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

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

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Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.
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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.
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Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.
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Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.
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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.
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Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is.
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Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.
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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.
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If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct -- unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.
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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.
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In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called conservative, as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.
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Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.
Camille Paglia
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The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity's ancient campaign against pagan nature.
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I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.
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Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a decade, and I gradually stopped monitoring them.
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Because of my own family's service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York National Guard), I am a strong supporter of the military and do believe that there are just wars.
Camille Paglia
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Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time.
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What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.
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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.
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The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.
Camille Paglia