Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. |
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. |
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens --and real diseases are useful material. |
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. |
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.On Photography |
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated. |
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses. |
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. |
Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture. |
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. |
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. |
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans / the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum. |
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. |
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been , what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal , needs to be protected from people. |
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser. |