For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff's pillow β we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it's been fun or it's been not. So all cats have a politician's air; we smile and smile and so they think we're villains
Interpretation
Cats seem to smile regardless of their true feelings, highlighting a facade we often present to the world.
This quote by Angela Carter reflects on the nature of cats and uses them as a metaphor for human behavior. Just as cats possess an enigmatic smile, people often put on a mask to conceal their true emotions. This 'smiling' facade can lead others to misjudge our intentions or feelings, suggesting that appearances can be deceptive and that individuals might be misunderstood based on the superficial expressions they display.
In practice
In a speech about authenticity, one might quote this to highlight how people often conceal their true feelings.
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.
We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.
People can be slave-ships in shoes.
Our interconnectedness on the planet is the dominating truth of the 21st century. One stark result is that the world's poor live, and especially die, with the awareness that the United States is doing little to mobilise the weapons of mass salvation that could offer them survival, dignity and eventually the escape from poverty.
Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.
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