Angela Carter Quotes

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

When I disappear, I will disappear; there'll be nothing left.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

I don't know their names. Their names have been erased from my memory banks. If I tried to bring 'em back, I'd get shocked.

There is no more Palestine. Finished ...

Memory is this one attempt to not be erased by time. And I think that ties back to what I learned watching my grandmother lose her memories is, you know, we are all facing erasure eventually.

Everything is created to be annihilated.

And blind oblivion swallowed cities up.

It Will Be As If I Never Existed

When one thing takes another away, what do we call that?” she asked my class. “Homicide!” I called out

Katniss, there is no District Twelve.

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

Destroy them later?" Cal offered, which was probably as close to friendly as he ever got.

I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

This naming of things is so crucial to possession - a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away - that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names.

To pay for my father's funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can't remember a nobody's name, that's why they're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable.

Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.

What is there? I know first of all that I am. But who am I? All I know of myself is that I suffer. And if I suffer it is because at the origin of myself there is mutilation, separation. I am separated. What I am separated from -- I cannot name it. But I am separated.

Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost.

I did not lose myself all at once.

There is no revenge like oblivion, for it is the entombment of the unworthy in the dust of their own nothingness.

She could not mourn. She could no longer weep grasping the essence of annihilation, she wished only to cease, to be no more, as if sunk in some profound sleep devoid of wakening.

We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.