“Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“Hope for the best, expect the worst.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“Wars are facts we cannot fuck away, Perry; nor laugh away, either.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“...as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows life longer than you do.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“...a great future behind him, already”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“It doesn't matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“Sorridi in pubblico, piangi in pubblico, vivi in pubblico, crepa in pubblico. C'era, sui loro visi, un'emozione schietta, atipica per gli attori. Stasera erano al telegiornale. E' la cosa peggiore veder soffrire i propri figli.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“La commedia è una tragedia che capita agli altri.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
“[...] certo, una madre è sempre una madre, perché è un fatto biologico, mentre un padre è una festa mobile.”
― Angela Carter, quote from Wise Children
Angela Carter
Born place: in Eastbourne, The United Kingdom
Born date May 7, 1940
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“What strange times we live in, when good must disguise itself in the tawdry rags of evil!”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from Balthasar's Odyssey
“Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning
“Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture…Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”
― Erica Jong, quote from Fear of Flying
“She couldn’t run away from him. She’d be running from her own heart.”
― Kerrelyn Sparks, quote from All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire
“It looks rather ordinary," said the Snork. "Unless you consider that a top hat is always somewhat extraordinary, of course.”
― Tove Jansson, quote from Finn Family Moomintroll
The Last Enchantment
The Collected Poems
The Living Dead
Everyone Loves a Her...
Teaching a Stone to...
Love Is a Many Trous...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
