Quotes from Camille Paglia

Psychoanalysis [...] overestimates the linguistic character of the unconscious. Dreaming is a pagan cinema.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

Human beings are not nature's favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.

Love is imploring humanity: Set down your burden of doubt; in perfect faith there is neither fear nor struggle.

Nature is forever playing solitaire with herself.

as texting has become the default discourse for an entire generation, the ability to read real-life facial expressions and body language is alarmingly atrophying.

What was distinctive in those emancipated women—and here loom my later problems with second-wave feminism—was that they never indulged in reflex male-bashing: they accepted and admired the enormity of what men had accomplished and were simply demanding a fair chance to prove that women could match or surpass it.

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.

W]earisome as it may seem, women must realize that, in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relationship.

There is nothing more important to me than the power of words to describe, re-create, entrance, and provoke.

Male urination is a form of commentary.

Taking the guest's hand, Love asks, "Who made the eyes but I?" (11–12). This brilliant sally asserts that man cannot look away from God, since everything we look at—and indeed our mental faculties as well as our organs of sight—were made by God. These "eyes" include the "I" of personal identity.

Maureen Dowd - that catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen. She's such an empty vessel. One pleasure of reading the New York Times online is that I never have to see anything written by Maureen Dowd! I ignore her hypertext like spam for penis extenders.

Literature and art are never created for scholars but for a universal audience. If academics cannot see that audience, the cannot see art.

idealism, however sabotaged by untidy reality, is a fundamental human value that separates us from the animal realm.

The movies have always shown how elemental passions boil beneath the thin veneer of civilization.

El artista no hace su arte para salvar a la humanidad, sino para salvarse a sí mismo. Todo comentario benévolo de un artista a este respecto no será sino echar una cortina de humo, ocultar el rastro sangriento de su asalto contra la realidad y los otros.

The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.

Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees.

Tragic woman is less moral than man. Her will-to-power is naked. Her actions are under a chthonian cloud.

The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that belived they were eternal.

Man's spiritual trajectory ends in the rubbish heap of his own mother-born body.

The idea that the stars literally influence men (by a falling fluid, an influenza) is plainly untenable. But that the movements of the constellations are a clock by which earthly changes can be measured is less easy to dismiss.

Incarnation, the limitation of mind by matter, is an outrage to the imagination.