Daily Inspiration Quote by Angela Carter

Better to be consumed than ignored: Angela Carter slips a provocation into that careful little “perhaps.” The line flirts with surrender to objectification, then immediately complicates it. “Valued as an object of passion” is a phrase that sounds like a concession to the male gaze, but Carter loads it with baited irony. “Valued” is an economic verb, transactional and chilly; “object” is a philosophical demotion; “passion” is the glossy alibi that makes exploitation feel like romance. Put together, they describe a culture where women are offered a cruel bargain: be desired on someone else’s terms, or vanish.

The intent isn’t to endorse the bargain so much as to expose the desperation that makes it tempting. Carter understood that in a world calibrated to reward women for attractiveness and availability, being wanted can read as proof of existence. The subtext is bleak: even “passion” can be a kind of appraisal, a market price pinned to a body. That “never to be valued at all” is the real horror here, pointing to social invisibility as punishment for refusing the role.

Context matters: Carter’s fiction (The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus) rewires fairy tales and pornographic tropes to show how desire can be both weapon and energy source. She’s not anti-sex; she’s anti-mystification. The sentence works because it stages the trap in real time, letting readers feel the seduction of being wanted and the humiliation of being reduced, then leaving “perhaps” like a splinter: are you agreeing, or noticing how you were trained to?