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.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of living in the present rather than solely placing hope in the uncertain future.
Angela Carter's quote suggests that relying on the future is akin to depending on an unproven theory, deeming it ultimately empty. She advocates for a focus on the present moment, highlighting the significance of dealing with current realities instead of getting lost in what might come.
In practice
In a motivational speech about mindfulness and living in the moment.
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.
I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.
The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods
You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).
It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.
When you see a man led to prison say in your heart, "Mayhap he is escaping from a narrower prison." And when you see a man drunken say in your heart, "Mayhap he sought escape from something still more unbeautiful.
Whenever ego suffers from fear of death & your practice turns to seeing impermanence, ego settles down.
The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.
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