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
Space
Blank
Speak
Poem
Stills
Shape
Still
Shapes
Mimics
Nothing
Advice
Ringing
Mind
Quiet
Charged
Something
Reader
Approaching
Make
Takes
Printed

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.
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.
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Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
Camille Paglia
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Much violence against women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total, despotic control of their marriages.
Camille Paglia
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Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Camille Paglia
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Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power.
Camille Paglia
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Because I'm criticizing liberalism, people automatically call me a conservative. This is madness! The idea that somehow one cannot critique liberalism from the left, from the left wing of liberalism. I mean, how can people be so stupid?
Camille Paglia
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I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's going to be a slow debasement of language, and that's what I think we're fighting.
Camille Paglia
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All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!
Camille Paglia
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I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hard-core gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. … Until the left comes to its senses about the cultural power of religion, the right will continue to broaden its appeal.
Camille Paglia
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There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.
Camille Paglia
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Science is a method of logical analysis of nature's operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature's forces, and their frequent predictability.
Camille Paglia
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When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.
Camille Paglia
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Today, the ideal male is the gay man and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men.
Camille Paglia
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America is still a frontier country of wide open spaces. Our closeness to nature is one reason why our problem is not repression but regression our notorious violence is the constant eruption of primi-tiveness, of anarchic individualism.
Camille Paglia
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Straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family--in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature.
Camille Paglia
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Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed.
Camille Paglia
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Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.
Camille Paglia
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What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.
Camille Paglia
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The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer's ink, think they're starting on the ground floor so they're condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them.
Camille Paglia