Time & Perspective Quote by Angela Carter

Angela Carter doesn not just distrust optimism; she treats it as a kind of metaphysical procrastination. By calling the future a "hypothesis", she drags hope out of the warm bath of inspiration and into the cold light of epistemology: a hypothesis is provisional, unproven, and easy to revise into oblivion. So "pin your hopes" becomes a faintly grotesque image, like fastening something living to a corkboard. The payoff is the brutal turn of phrase: to bet on the future is to translate your desires into "nothingness". Not disappointment, not delay, but an actively produced void.

The intent is less motivational poster than moral rebuke. Carter is warning against the political and personal alibi of tomorrow - the way regimes promise eventual progress while demanding present obedience, and the way individuals barter away agency by treating life as a waiting room. The subtext is feminist in a Carterian register: the future is often the place patriarchy tells women to live (after you are married, after you are thinner, after you are chosen). Hope can be a leash when it is outsourced.

"Here and now" lands like a shove. The diction is plain, almost impatient, which is part of the rhetoric: no lyrical escape hatch, no romantic haze. Carter is a novelist who trafficked in the baroque and the fantastical, yet she pins the reader to material time. The context of her era - late-20th-century disillusionment with grand narratives, alongside a fierce insistence on bodily reality and power as it operates day-to-day - makes the line feel like both diagnosis and dare.