Angela Carter Quotes

More having to do whatever anybody said you had to do. I couldn't really do anything on my own. But as I got older and then came to America and then Grace became my name, it somehow freed me. All of a sudden, I can be this other person.

A really big thing I've learned - and I think it's so liberating - is when you realize no one knows what they're doing.

The second you realize you're not alienated, that makes you empowered.

I don't think I really accepted my power as a woman until I realized that no was a complete sentence. When I stopped making excuses for saying it and began creating boundaries in my life, I knew real power.

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

Getting to be authentic is so liberating.

I used to find limitations frustrating, but I find them enormously liberating.

I feel after 'Pink' my time has come.

It is only through hard work and awareness that we can truly own our identity.

I am doing something I love, travelling the world, meeting fans, feeling confident, and I am no longer restricted by my sexuality.

I think I finally have really taken ownership of myself and me as a gymnast.

Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.

A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!

Most of society thinks that biography is destiny, that the past equals the future, and of course it does if you live there...but what we really have to remind ourselves is that decision is the ultimate power.

In one day I had altered my life; my life, therefore, was alterable. This simple axiom did not call out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin. I could feel it pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own free will.

People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self.

And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.

I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else's control. I feel that what I'm thinking and saying is now for myself. Before it was for and by the guidance of Elijah Muhammad. Now I think with my own mind, sir!

I am learning that if I just go on accepting the framework for life that others have given me, if I fail to make my own choices, the reason for my life will be missing. I will be unable to recognize that which I have the power to change.

It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.

Sometimes identity can be your salvation. It can be liberating to find your place in the world, but at some point, identity can hold you back.

The cry of the Have-Nots has never been "give us our hearts," but always "get off our backs"; they ask not for love but for breathing space.

You have the power to let power go

To transform the world women need to strive for authenticity.

Understanding one's own power is more interesting than someone being given something powerful.