Angela Carter

Famous quotes by angela carter:

“The essence of the physicality of the most famous blonde in the world is a wholesome eroticism blurred a little round the edges by the fact she is not quite sure what eroticism is. This gives her her tentative luminosity and what makes her, somehow, always more like her own image in the mirror than she is like herself.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)

“Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)

“Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)

“And, indeed, is there not something holy about a great kitchen?... The scoured gleam of row upon row of metal vessels dangling from hooks or reposing on their shelves till needed with the air of so many chalices waiting for the celebration of the sacrament of food. And the range like an altar, yes, before which my mother bowed in perpetual homage, a fringe of sweat upon her upper lip and the fire glowing in her cheeks.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)

“You feel you could pucker up and blow away the miles between 49 Bard Road [Brixton] and that apartment in New York where I could be tomorrow morning, if the apartment still existed, if Peregrine still existed, if the past weren’t deeper than the sea, more difficult to cross.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)