In short, camp mocks bad taste; kitsch exploits it. Camp arouses our sense of the ridiculous and we respond with amused tolerance.... When we see Bette Davis or Ruth Gordon, fine if sometimes flamboyant performers, relax their self-discipline and overextend their acting technique in a superfluity of ineffective gestures--finger-twitching and hip-switching, hand-rubbing or hip-protruding--we label the sum total as camp. Mae West, whose nasally provocative delivery, eye-rolling, lip-pursing, and pelvic tics parody the conventional invitation to dalliance, is never out of control and is camp, pure and simple.... Camp was also the stock-in-trade of Carmen Miranda, whose retina-searing Technicolor get-ups, skyscraper headdresses bearing a season's fruit harvest, clomping platform shoes and garbled English projected in a voice that could be heard on Mars all came together beautifully in her campy personification of Exaggeration. Had we been blessed with the Brazilian Bombshell's own blazing interpretation of Joan of Arc, the grotesque, if fascinating, result would surely have been kitsch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You who have condemned me, I know your kind. Your forebears poisoned Socrates, burned Joan of Arc, hanged, tortured all those whos...e only offense was to bring light into darkness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal "the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of t...hose candidates [for the ministry]." He said he didn't know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate's coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before we shall again behold In his diurnal race the world's great eye,... We may as silent be and cold As are the shades where buried lovers lie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity which, by... many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our missiles always make too short an arc: They fall, they rip the grass, they intersect... The curve of earth, and striking, break their own;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determi...ne their whole curve.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
General de Gaulle was a thoroughly bad boy. The day he arrived, he thought he was Joan of Arc and the following day he insisted th...at he was Georges Clemenceau.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »