She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. from "The Lady of the Haunted House
Interpretation
The quote illustrates the idea of being influenced by one’s past and heritage, which can be both enlightening and unsettling.
In this quote, Angela Carter suggests that individuals are often shaped by their ancestors and past experiences, leading to an inner conflict between self-identity and external influences. The metaphor of a 'haunted house' portrays a person who feels overshadowed or 'haunted' by their history, whereby the memories and traits of ancestors manifest in ways that can evoke fear or confusion about one's true self.
In practice
A public speaking event discussing the influence of family history on personal identity.
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 — 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.
I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know.
The power of the world always works in circles.
The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
It is clear that there is some difference between ends: some ends are energeia [energy], while others are products which are additional to the energeia.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.
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