Angela Carter

Angela Carter (May 7, 1940 – February 16, 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her post-feminist magical realist and science fiction works.

Quotes

 * Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it.
 * The Kitchen Child (1976).


 * Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.
 * The Bridled Sweeties (1977).


 * Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
 * Wise Children (1991), ch. 5 (p. 213).


 * Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
 * Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992).


 * A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.
 * Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992).


 * Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.
 * Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings (1998).


 * My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis.
 * Response to a student's question in her writing class, as quoted by Louis Menand in the New Yorker (June 8-15, 2009), p. 112.


 * I'm interested in the division that Judeo-Christianity has made between human nature and animal nature. None of the other great faiths in the world have got quite that division between us and them. None of the others has made this enormous division between birds and beasts who, as Darwin said, would have developed consciences if they'd had the chance, and us. I think it's one of the scars in Western Europe. I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.
 * Interview in Marxism Today (January 1985).

Quotes about Carter

 * One thing that happens with gothic fiction, and I think the person who explores this most keenly is probably Angela Carter in her collection of retold fairy tales, is that gothic fiction seems to echo certain fairy tales...She pulls at these threads that fairy tales have, these elements that they have that we don’t think about much.
 * Silvia Moreno-Garcia Interview with Vox (2020)