we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.
Interpretation
Symbols are shaped by our experiences, and we should not dismiss them as insignificant.
Angela Carter's quote explores the idea that the symbols we create and use in our lives are a reflection of our unique experiences and circumstances. Rather than criticizing these symbols for appearing trivial or absurd, we should recognize that they are inherently tied to the nature of our existence and the meanings we derive from them.
In practice
In a discussion about art interpretation, this quote could emphasize how individual experience shapes our understanding.
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 — 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.
A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.
The gospel cannot be preached and heard enough, for it cannot be grasped well enough ... Moreover, our greatest task is to keep you faithful to this article and to bequeath this treasure to you when we die.
Ambition is a gilded misery, a secret poison, a hidden plague, the engineer of deceit, the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the original of vices, the moth of holiness, the blinder of hearts, turning medicines into maladies, and remedies into diseases.
We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country.
There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility, -which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).
Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
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