Quotes from Wise Children

Angela Carter ·  240 pages

Rating: (5.8K votes)


“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



About the author

Angela Carter
Born place: in Eastbourne, The United Kingdom
Born date May 7, 1940
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Popular quotes

“The stars are always there, even in the daylight. Sometimes we just can't see them.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from Angels


“There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, quote from Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century


“Si j'étais le soleil, je chercherais un autre endroit pour illuminer, un endroit où les gens n'utiliseraient pas ma lumière pour faire des choses horribles.”
― Uzodinma Iweala, quote from Beasts of No Nation


“Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured). Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph. It is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex: no secondary, untimely object ever manages to half conceal, delay, or distract... A proof a contrario: Mapplethorpe shifts his close-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material.


The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche; for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image; at most it amuses me (and even then, boredom follows quickly). The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography


“He Who Knows And Knows That He Knows Is A Wise Man - Follow Him;
He Who Knows Not And Knows Not That He Knows Not Is A Fool - Shun Him”
― Confucius, quote from The Analects


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