Germaine Greer Quotes

I know as little about the nature of romantic love as I knew when I
was eighteen, but I do know about the deep pleasure of continuing
interest, the excitement of wanting to know what somebody else
thinks, will do, will not do, the tricks played and unplayed, the short
cord that the years make into rope, and in my case, is there, hanging
loose, long after death.)
And so he lived with me for the last four years of his life. Not all
of that time was easy, indeed some of it was very bad, but it was an
unspoken pleasure that having come together so many years before,
ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured. Sometimes I
would resent the understated or seldom stated side of us and,
guessing death wasn’t too far away, I would try for something to
have afterwards. One day I said, ‘We’ve done fine, haven’t we?’
He said, ‘Fine’s too big a word for me. Why don’t we just say
we’ve done better than most people?

Love, love, love – all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.

"Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark ... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed."

[Still in Melbourne January 1987]

L'energia è il potere che guida ogni essere umano. Non viene persa con l'impiego ma mantenuta dallo stesso, perché è una facoltà della psiche.

Cunt-lapping, mother-fucking, and cock-sucking are words to provoke a sense of outrage. Being forced to play the role of a woman in sexual intercourse is the deepest imaginable humiliation, which is only worsened if the victim finds to his horror that he enjoys it.

At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equaling Hals at his best, had been discovered.

Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept (as if un-great art were unworthy of even their most casual and ill-informed attention), makes us stand back and admire. It rushes upon us pell-mell like the work of Rubens or Tintoretto or Delacroix, or towers above us. There is of course another aesthetic: the art of a Vermeer or a Braque seeks not to amaze and appal but to invite the observer to come closer, to close with the painting, peer into it, become intimate with it. Such art reinforces human dignity.

The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.

When the choice lies between the ultra-feminine and the virago,
Shakespeare’s sympathy lies with the virago. The women of the
tragedies are all feminine — even Lady Macbeth (who is so often
misinterpreted as a termagant), especially Gertrude, morally unconscious,
helpless, voluptuous, and her younger version, infantile
Ophelia, the lustful sisters, Goneril and Regan opposed by the warrior
princess Cordelia who refuses to simper and pander to her
father’s irrational desire. Desdemona is fatally feminine, but realizes
it and dies understanding how she has failed Othello. Only Cleopatra
has enough initiative and desire to qualify for the status of female
hero.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.

The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.

If we could present an attainable ideal of love it would resemble
the relationship described by Maslow as existing between self-realizing
personalities. It is probably a fairly perilous equilibrium: certainly
the forces of order and civilization react fairly directly to
limit the possibilities of self-realization. Maslow describes his ideal
personalities as having a better perception of reality — what Herbert
Read called an innocent eye, like the eye of the child who does not
seek to reject reality. Their relationship to the world of phenomena
is not governed by their personal necessity to exploit it or be exploited
by it, but a desire to observe it and to understand it. They
have no disgust; the unknown does not frighten them. They are
without defensiveness or affectation. The only causes of regret are
laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy and
envy. Their behaviour is spontaneous but it corresponds to an
autonomous moral code. Their thinking is problem-centred, not egocentred
and therefore they most often have a sense of commitment
to a cause beyond their daily concerns. Their responses are geared
to the present

Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.

Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women — and has become an option for men — while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character.

Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man.