Shane Fairhead

“as texting has become the default discourse for an entire generation, the ability to read real-life facial expressions and body language is alarmingly atrophying.”
― Camille Paglia, Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education

“The mythology of a people is far more than a collection of pretty or terrifying fables to be retold in carefully bowdlerized form to our schoolchildren. It is the comment of the men of one particular age or civilization on the mysteries of human existence and the human mind, their model for social behaviour, and their attempt to define in stories of gods and demons their perception of the inner realities. We can learn much from the mythologies of earlier peoples if we have the humility to respect ways of thought widely differing from our own. In certain respects we may be far cleverer than they, but not necessarily wiser. We cannot return to the mythological thinking of an earlier age; it is beyond our reach, like the vanished world of childhood. Even if we feel a nostalgic longing for the past, like that of Jon Keats for Ancient Greece of William Morris for medieval England, there is now no way of entry. The Nazis tries to revive the myths of ancient Germany in their ideology, but such an attempt could only lead to sterility and moral suicide. We cannot deny the demands of our own age, but this need not prevent us turning to the faith of another age with sympathetic understanding, and recapturing imaginatively some of its vanished power. It will even help us view more clearly the assumptions and beliefs of our own time”
― H. R. Ellis Davidson

“I maintain that what is taken for a naturally inspired horror of death is merely the fruit of the absurd fears which we, starting in childhood, develop regarding this total annihilation, fears initiated by the religious notions our elders stupidly cram into our young heads. Once cured of these fears and reassured concerning our fate, not only do we cease to behold death with alarm and repugnance, but it becomes easy to prove that death is in reality nothing more nor less than a voluptuous pleasure.”
― Marquis de Sade, Juliette

“There is nothing more important to me than the power of words to describe, re-create, entrance, and provoke.”
― Camille Paglia, Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education