Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 43
“Romanticism, like the Rousseauist Swinging Sixties, misunderstands the Dionysian as the pleasure principle, when it is in fact the gross continuum of pleasure-pain. Worshiping nature and seeking political and sexual freedom, Romanticism ends in imaginative entrammelment of every kind. Perfect freedom is intolerable and therefore impossible.”
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 231
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Camille Paglia 326
American writer 1947Related quotes
“Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom.”
Ibid., p. 62
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Não o prazer, não a glória, não o poder: a liberdade, unicamente a liberdade.
transition [sic] was the avant-garde English-language magazine published in Paris 1927–1938; “A Note on Poetry”, p. 48
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
as remembered by William S. Burroughs, in: Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw. The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012, p. 61.
"Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?" (1981), No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992)
Context: These apparently opposed perspectives meet on the common ground of sexual conservatism. The monogamists uphold the traditional wife's "official" values: emotional commitment is inseparable from a legal/moral obligation to permanence and fidelity; men are always trying to escape these duties; it's in our interest to make them shape up. The separatists tap into the underside of traditional femininity — the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims. These are the two faces of feminine ideology in a patriarchal culture: they induce women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power.
“It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness”
Source: Far from the Madding Crowd
“As the thing more perfect is,
The more it feels of pleasure and of pain.”
Canto VI, lines 107–108 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno