If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?
Interpretation
This quote suggests that identifying an external enemy helps us avoid accountability for our own problems.
Angela Carter's quote reflects on the human tendency to seek external sources to blame for our difficulties and frustrations. By acknowledging that if we eliminate the 'barbarians' or external enemies, we may be left with the uncomfortable truth that we cannot blame others for our own shortcomings and failures. It challenges us to confront our own responsibilities and the complexities of society where scapegoats have often been used to divert attention from deeper issues.
In practice
During a lecture on societal issues, this quote could highlight the importance of self-reflection.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written β heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right, By these we reach divinity
The subway in New York is a great social experiment; there are so many races and ways of life sitting together on each car.
And over your unconsecrated head you'll hear the howling wolves lament their fate and yours the livelong year.
The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.
No man chooses evil because it's evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
The fortunate circumstances of our lives are generally found, at last, to be of our own producing.
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