# Quote — Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

> The English language was created by poets, a five-hundred year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest dialogue in world literature. French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.

- Author: [Camille Paglia](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia.md)
- Book: [Sexual Personae](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae.md)
- Page: 34
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia#Sexual_Personae:_Art_and_Decadence_from_Nefertiti_to_Emily_Dickinson_(1990)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-english-language

## More from this book

> Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.

p. 672 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/sappho-is-a-great.md)

> In 'A Room of One's Own', Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman's dominance.

p. 295 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/in-a-room.md)

> The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimentality. … Heterosexuality inhibited his imagination because woman is physically and psychologically internal.

p. 571 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-reason-wilde.md)