What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves if the poor ceased to exist?
Interpretation
The quote prompts reflection on the social dynamics between the rich and the poor.
Angela Carter's quote challenges us to consider the existential value of wealth and class disparity. It suggests that the identity and purpose of the privileged may be contingent on the existence of those who are less fortunate, provoking thought about interdependence and the societal roles we play.
In practice
In a discussion on economic inequality during a seminar on social justice.
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.
Those who live to live forever, never fear dying.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
The history of Rome presents various men of greater genius than Scipio Aemilianus, but none equalling him in moral purity, in the utter absence of political selfishness, in generous love of his country, and none, perhaps, to whom destiny has assigned a more tragic part.
I knew that was really the only purpose of life: to be our self, live our truth, and be the love that we are.
A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.
You see, there's the way things seemed and then there's the way things were and one is so often the total reverse of the other.
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