Terry Castle > Quotes

“True or False? The delusion that doing well in school will win me love has disfigured my life. Discuss in 5-7 pages.”
― Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings

“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.”
― Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture

“...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.”
― Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings

“The obsessions of others embarrass and repel because they seem to dehumanize, to make the obsessed one robotic and alien and unavailable.”
― Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings

“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.”
― Terry Castle

“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.”
― Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings