The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it. Camille Paglia More Quotes by Camille Paglia More Quotes From Camille Paglia Elizabeth Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest actress in film history. She instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies. Opening her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realm of emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition. Richard Burton said that Taylor showed him how to act for the camera. Economy and understatement are essential. At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory, pagan phenomenon. Camille Paglia film-historyspaceeye The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification. Camille Paglia criticismhonorart Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed. Camille Paglia nefertitigoddessbeautiful Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion! What feminism does not need, it seems to me, is an endless recycling of Doris Day Fifties clichés about noble womanhood. Camille Paglia feminismcompassiondoe I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots. Camille Paglia skillswritingschool Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs. Camille Paglia naziconnoisseurart At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father's business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains. Camille Paglia motherfatherjesus The post-war "publish or perish" tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. [...] One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book. Camille Paglia qualitywarbook Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate. Camille Paglia feminismfatepolitical It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed." As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics. Camille Paglia readingletting-goattitude I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology. Camille Paglia successfulviewsmen The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force. Camille Paglia femininesubmissionthrill In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace. Camille Paglia gaypoliticalorder When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place. Camille Paglia activismfeminismgay The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure. Camille Paglia doomedsex Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight. Camille Paglia sightartthinking We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism. Camille Paglia barbarismcynicismviolence Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees. Camille Paglia agreelaughing Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism. Camille Paglia eroticenergygiving Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin. Camille Paglia femalebodymen
