Quotes from Terry Castle

True or False? The delusion that doing well in school will win me love has disfigured my life. Discuss in 5-7 pages.

It would be putting it mildly to say that the lesbian represents a threat to patriarchal protocol: Western civilization has for centuries been haunted by a fear of 'women without men'—of women indifferent or resistant to male desire.

the very greatest satire, I came to think -- the kind that lives forever -- ultimately grew out of a debunking attitude toward the self. To see the world mock-heroically was necessarily to engage in a sort of preliminary self-burlesque. You couldn't take yourself *that* seriously. You were part of it. All the Lilliputian preening and pomposity was, at bottom, one's own.

Especially for upwardly mobile young females, declaring one's enthusiasm for Austen (whose heroines almost always move up in social and economic status as a result of the sterling marital alliances they form) has been a classic means of indicating one's purported good taste, good breeding, and good sense: I am an especially adorable member of the ruling class.

The obsessions of others embarrass and repel because they seem to dehumanize, to make the obsessed one robotic and alien and unavailable.

the carefully cultivated moral seriousness—strenuousness might be a better word—coexisted with a fantastical, mrs. jellyby–like absurdity. sontag's complicated and charismatic sexuality was part of this comic side of her life. the high-mindedness, the high-handedness, commingled with a love of gossip, drollery, and seductive acting out—and, when she was in a benign and unthreatened mood, a fair amount of ironic self-knowledge.