Angela Carter Quotes

Even if we no longer have much in common, we would have always had the past, which, in some ways, is just as important as the present or future. It is where we come from, what makes us who we are.

Ryan is my bridge to the past, to memories that lose some of their sting when he recounts them.

No matter where we come from or where we're going, we've all got memories to contend with, and it's always best not to do this alone!

When you get together with childhood friends, for example, there's an intimacy that you instantly have because you share something really profound in your past. There's a shortcut to emotional intimacy if you share your past with somebody. It's really empowering when you're reunited with people who share that.

We laughed ourselves silly, taking back our shared past, gently, piece by piece.

What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded--God knows how--in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.

We may not have a future, but you can't deny we have a past.

Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.

Sisters share the scent and smells... the feel of a common childhood.

You can't live in the past, and I don't. I'm not nostalgic about my own work, at all.

If you try to live that which is past, that which IS will bypass you.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

The past is not clinging to you; YOU are clinging to the past. Once you are not clinging, the past simply EVAPORATES!

I know that Europe's wonderful, yet something seems to lack;The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling ,and sewn with rebus threads.Most of the time , the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on .

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

I used to think that I wouldn't change anything from my past, because doing so would inevitably affect who I am now. But considering my current state, I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea to go back in time to fix things.

When one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one's sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard.

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.