She stood lost in eternity... watching the immense sky...

— Angela Carter

She was a Victorian girl; a girl of the days when men were hard and top-hatted and masculine and ruthless and girls were gentle and meek and did a great deal of sewing and looked after the poor and laid their tender napes beneath a husband’s booted foot, and even if he brought home cabals of half-naked chorus girls and had them dance on the rich round mahogany dining-table (rosily reflecting great pearly hams and bums in its polished depths). Or, drunk to a frenzy, raped the kitchen-maid before the morning assembly of servants and children and her black silk-dressed self (gathered for prayers). Or forced her to stitch, on shirts, her fingers to rags to pay his gambling debts. Husbands were a force of nature or an act of God; like an earthquake or the dreaded consumption, to be borne with, to be meekly acquiesced to, to be impregnated by as frequently as Nature would allow. It took the mindless persistence, the dogged imbecility of the gray tides, to love a husband.

— Angela Carter

She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.

— Angela Carter

She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.

— Angela Carter

Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.

— Angela Carter

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

— Angela Carter

The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?

— Angela Carter

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

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.

— Angela Carter

The perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

— Angela Carter