Daily Inspiration Quote by Angela Carter

Carter twists the knife with a line that sounds like a casual aside and lands like an indictment. Calling cultural self-regard a "scar" doesn’t just mean it’s ugly; it implies damage that has healed wrong, a permanent mark from some earlier wound. The target is a particular modern vanity: the idea that human beings are basically spiritual creatures who occasionally slip, rather than animals who occasionally manage grace.

Her contrast is doing two jobs at once. "Angels" is the flattering myth we tell ourselves to justify domination - over nature, over other people, over our own appetites. "Higher primates" is the corrective, not to humiliate us but to re-situate us in the real world of bodies, hierarchies, mating, aggression, play. Carter isn’t arguing for cynicism so much as for honesty. The subtext is that a culture that insists on angelhood will treat ordinary human impulses as shameful, then outsource responsibility to abstractions: destiny, purity, evil, salvation. That’s how you get moral panics and cruelty with clean hands.

Context matters: Carter wrote in a late-20th-century Britain still haunted by Christian moral inheritance, newly saturated by mass media fantasies, and increasingly shaped by second-wave feminism’s fight against the sanctification of womanhood. Her fiction repeatedly strips the "mythic" costume off gender and power. This quote is the manifesto version: stop flattering the species, stop romanticizing virtue, and you might finally see how power actually moves - through flesh, stories, and the dangerous comfort of believing we were meant to be better than we are.