Camp Quotes

“It wasn’t easy looking dignified wearing a bed sheet and a purple cape.”
― Rick Riordan, The Son of Neptune

“What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“Percy: I’ll walk down to the cabins and Connor and Travis are stealing stuff from the camp store, and Silena is arguing with Annabeth trying to give her a new makeover, and Clarisse is still sticking the new kids’ head into the toilets. It’s nice that some things never change.”
― Rick Riordan, The Demigod Files

“I felt very close to God.... My friends say that's because I was always on my knees.”
― Armistead Maupin

“There is right and there is wrong, I have NEVER been wrong.”
― John Waters, Pink Flamingos and Other Filth: Three Screenplays

“As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.”
― Brad Herzog, Turn Left At The Trojan Horse: A Would-Be Hero's American Odyssey

“Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Hello possums!”
― Dame Edna Everage

“Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman'.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Somebody had messed with my favorite place in the world, and I was not... well, a happy camper.”
― Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters

“I just feel stupid’
‘Not stupid,’ George says. ‘A romantic maybe. A dreamer.’
‘A theater kid,’ Ashley says.
‘But never stupid,’ George finishes.”
― L.C. Rosen, Camp

“Camp which knows itself to be Camp ('camping') is usually less satisfying.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“For the LORD your God walks in the midst of thy camp to deliver thee and to give up thine enemies before thee; therefore shall thy camp be holy; that he see no unclean thing in thee and turn away from you."Deuteronomy 23:14”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment - or arouses a necessary sympathy.”
― Susan Sontag

“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine…”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“They had somehow taken a group of women from the town through the (concentration) camps to show them what had been right there, and Tommy's brother said that although some of the women wept, some of them put their chins up, and looked angry, as if they refused to be made to feel bad.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible

“The sound of the airplanes is in the key of war. The thunder of the truck trains, the sputter of the motorcycles, the music of the bugles, and even the howling of the dogs are parts of the symphony of war.”
― Clair Kenamore

“I sent my son here [Hackshack] for camp. The plan was 2 weeks here and then go to another camp. When it was time for pickup at 5 (after an 8 hour day) he refused to leave. He would beg for "another 5 minutes". We ended up extending for the whole summer and he is now begging me to sign him up for after school classes. Mike & Gina (the owners) are amazing. I don't know what magic they do, but the environment they create is warm, nurturing, and welcoming. As a bonus--he learned a ton!”
― Esti Prager

“Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“Gaudi's lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal — most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia — the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“That girl wasn’t who she wanted to. be anymore, but sometimes you don’t get to choose who you are.”
― Margaux MacAllister

“After lots of lectures, warnings, punishments and so on, Eddy had decided to watch his step for a while.”
― Michael P. Waite, Eddy and His Amazing Pet

“4. Thou shall attempt a staycation, even if thou detests the word staycation.
There are two types of people in the world. Those who will camp, and those who won't.
Those who fall in the former category need little encouragement to pack up their sleeping bag and a Kelly Kettle and head out into the countryside. The ones who wander freely clearing up after themselves can set up a tent anywhere they fancy, as long as they show respect.
This freedom to roam also lends itself well to the coorie movement. Braving the night-time chill around a fire with a furry friend at your feet and a hot chocolate in your hands after a day of toiling to create a coorie campsite is pretty special.
A caravan stay in Aberfeldy is a more realistic option for the extended family than schlepping abroad en masse.
Bonding time between grandparents and wee ones also gives mums and dads the chance for a gin on the banks of the River Tay before sundown.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“Stars really shine when camping!”
― Steven Magee

“Does babygirl mean camp?”
― Matty Healy

“Dear Mom and Dad,
This place is terrible. Each day I am subjected to countless atrocities. The food is spoiled and poisonous, and the drinking water is contaminated so there is an outbreak of typhoid. Our cabin collapsed last night in a typhoon, but don’t worry. Only one guy was killed.

It’s not all bad. I do have one friend, named Mike. He’s the one who pulled me out of the quicksand. I have to haul garbage every day, but there aren’t too many wild animals at the dump and I’ve only been bitten twice.

Mr. Warden, the director, is very nice, and he has a real social conscience. He hires only desperate criminals as counsellors. Our bunk counsellor, whose name is Chip, is a reformed axe-murderer on parole. He has red eyes and yells a lot and keeps an axe under his mattress.

Tonight is going to be really fun. Our cabin hasn’t been fixed yet, so we get to sleep in trees. I sure hope the typhoon doesn’t start up again.

I’ll be safe and sound so long as Algonkian Island doesn’t sink any further. …

P.S. If this letter looks messy it’s because I’m writing it while being chased by a bear.”
― Gordon Korman, I Want to Go Home!

“The whole set of stylizations that are known as 'camp' (a word that I was hearing then for the first time) was, in 1926, self-explanatory. Women moved and gesticulated in this way. Homosexuals wished for obvious reasons to copy them. The strange thing about 'camp' is that it has become fossilized. The mannerisms have never changed. If I were now to see a woman sitting with her knees clamped together, one hand on her hip and the other lightly touching her back hair, I should think, 'Either she scored her last social triumph in 1926 or it is a man in drag.'
Perhaps 'camp' is set in the 'twenties because after that differences between the sexes—especially visible differences—began to fade. This, of course, has never mattered to women in the least. They know they are women. To homosexuals, who must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine, it is frustrating. They look back in sorrow to that more formal era and try to re-live it.
The whole structure of society was at that time much more rigid than it has ever been since, and in two main ways. The first of these was sexual.
The short skirts, bobbed hair and flat chests that were in fashion were in fact symbols of immaturity. No one ever drew attention to this, presumably out of politeness. The word 'boyish' was used to describe the girls of that era. This epithet they accepted graciously. They knew that they looked nothing like boys. They also realized that it was meant to be a compliment. Manliness was all the rage.
The men of the 'twenties searched themselves for vestiges of effeminacy as though for lice. They did not worry about their characters but about their hair and their clothes. Their predicament was that they must never be caught worrying about either. I once heard a slightly dandified friend of my brother say, 'People are always accusing me of taking care over my appearance.'
The sexual meaning of behaviour was only sketchily understood, but the symbolism of clothes was recognized by everyone. To wear suede shoes was to be under suspicion. Anyone who had hair rather than bristle at the back of his neck was thought to be an artist, a foreigner or worse. A friend of mine who was young in the same decade as I says that, when he was introduced to an elderly gentleman as an artist, the gentleman said, 'Oh, I know this young man is an artist. The other day I saw him in the street in a brown jacket.'
The other way in which society in the 'twenties was rigid was in its class distinctions. Doubtless to a sociologist there were many different strata merging here and there but, among the people that I was now getting to know, there were only two classes. They never mingled except in bed. There was 'them', who acted refined and spoke nice and whose people had pots of money, and there was 'us', who were the salt of the earth.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“Camp Eagle Ridge was my favorite place on Earth.”
― Ezra Dao, It Starts with Summer