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

“I remember having a chat with her once in her office that fall, in which she revealed with some pride (and more than a little hostility) a dramatic plan, indeed, to leave the cosseted life of the scholar behind and join the proletariat. She was going to get a uniformed job,
she announced—maybe even “drahv buus.” Now “drahvin buus” was clearly another Jo-ism for the ages. She made the activity in question—tootling gently down the avenue, halting every block or so to take on elderly passengers—sound like some primitive yet cathartic physical function: something one might perform in private, with deep shame, but also with an enormous, juddering sense of relief.
I admit it, I probably simpered. I deserved whatever dirty look she gave me. An effete little twit like I was could not be expected to understand such urgency, such ecstasy, such authenticity.”
― Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings