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.
Evil doesnβt have to be an overt act; it can be merely the absence of good. If you have the ability, the resources, and the opportunity to do good and you do nothing, that can be evil.
True revolutionaries are like God - they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.
Our deeds disguise us. People need endless time to try on their deeds, until each knows the proper deeds for him to do. But every day, every hour, rushes by. There is no time.
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose
The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable.
The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
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