Quote

What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.

Camille Paglia

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Secret
Mona
Call
Lisa
History
Walter
Fear
Menace
Nothing
Vampire
Thinking
Tasks
Courses
Coasting
Course
Blankness

More quotes by Camille Paglia

Image
Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.
Camille Paglia
Image
Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest.
Camille Paglia
Image
Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition.
Camille Paglia
Image
Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.
Camille Paglia
Image
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
Image
In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.
Camille Paglia
Image
A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on 'All My Children' when half the women actors, young and old, seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands clustering lankly round ladies' necks! Like orange tanning spray, this is a fashion fad that should be put out of its misery.
Camille Paglia
Image
Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?
Camille Paglia
Image
American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap.
Camille Paglia
Image
Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.
Camille Paglia
Image
We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way. Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.
Camille Paglia
Image
The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
Camille Paglia
Image
Not a shred of evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time... The matriarchy hypothesis, revived by American feminism, continues to flourish outside the university.
Camille Paglia
Image
The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.
Camille Paglia
Image
My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility
Camille Paglia
Image
Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women.
Camille Paglia
Image
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
Image
Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which, like it or not, is modern reality.
Camille Paglia
Image
Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.
Camille Paglia
Image
Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.
Camille Paglia