Happiness Quote by Angela Carter

A line like this from Angela Carter lands less as a Hallmark sentiment than as a small act of defiance. Carter spent her career stripping the lace off “feminine” stories and showing the machinery underneath: power, appetite, performance, metamorphosis. So when she exclaims, “What a joy it is to dance and sing!” the sweetness is the point and the trap. Joy here isn’t innocence; it’s chosen, embodied, a refusal to be reduced to victimhood or pure symbol.

Dance and song are also coded acts in Carter’s world: performance as survival, spectacle as agency. Her heroines learn that the stage can be a cage, but it can also be a weapon. The line’s bright simplicity reads like a folk refrain, the kind of thing you’d hear in a fairy tale right before the knife comes out. That tension is Carter’s signature. She loves the sensory rush - movement, breath, voice - while keeping one eyebrow raised at who gets to move freely and who’s made to entertain.

Context matters: Carter was writing in a late-20th-century feminist moment that distrusted “pretty” pleasures as distractions, yet she insisted on pleasure as political material. The sentence is almost aggressively uncomplicated, a flash of bodily autonomy that can’t be argued into submission. It’s joy as praxis: not transcendence, but muscle and mouth, insisting on life in a culture that often prefers women silent, still, and decorous.