Izzi Hogben > Izzi's Quotes

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.”
― Camille Paglia

“Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.”
― Camille Paglia

“A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men.”
― Camille Paglia

“Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals.”
― Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

“Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn

“Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their ''evil'' look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it”
― Camille Paglia

“The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.”
― Camille Paglia

“Psychoanalysis [...] overestimates the linguistic character of the unconscious. Dreaming is a pagan cinema.”
― Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“Overconcentration on any one point is distortion.”
― Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life