Quote

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.

Camille Paglia

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Camille Paglia
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: April 2
Art Historian
Essayist
Film Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Professor
Teacher
Writer
Endicott
New York
Camille Anna Paglia
Still
Shapes
Mimics
Nothing
Advice
Ringing
Mind
Quiet
Charged
Something
Reader
Approaching
Make
Takes
Printed
Space
Blank
Speak
Poem
Stills
Shape

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap.
Camille Paglia
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Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.
Camille Paglia
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Once you have become the centre of a conflict in a complex governmental enterprise you have the obligation to resign.
Camille Paglia
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I want young women when they're 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives. I think it's criminal - child abuse - that they're not told to do this [in school]. Right now it's just sex education and putting condoms on bananas. Girls should be asked to think about what they want in their lives when they're 50, 60 and 70.
Camille Paglia
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The moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate - which is why Mitt Romney's political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.
Camille Paglia
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The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.
Camille Paglia
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The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.
Camille Paglia
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There are no female geniuses because there are no female Jack-the-Rippers.
Camille Paglia
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Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is.
Camille Paglia
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Homosexuality is not 'normal' On the contrary it is a challenge to the norm...Nature exists whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction...No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous...homosexuality is an adaptation, not an inborn trait.
Camille Paglia
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Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.
Camille Paglia
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A woman simply is, but a man must become.
Camille Paglia
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Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.
Camille Paglia
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Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!
Camille Paglia
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Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.
Camille Paglia
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I sometimes call my new system 'Italian pagan Catholicism,' but it could more accurately be called 'pragmatic liberalism,' with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic.
Camille Paglia
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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
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Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.
Camille Paglia
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Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest.
Camille Paglia
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I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care.
Camille Paglia