American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.


Susan Sontag

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed ...
SUSAN SONTAG
I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES
Before you dive in head first, make sure the water is not shallow.
KATHERINE DIVOLIS
Well, I'm more lopsided than a one legged badger," mewed Graypaw, breaking off from his carful stalk...
ERIN HUNTER
No milk. It is black coffee, pure but strong, that fortifies against the powers of darkness with whi...
ROBERT AICKMAN
I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of cours...
JON KRAKAUER
The tug of the lodestar slowly grew stronger until, with an abrupt quantum jump, it was a physical f...
PAUL MCAULEY
I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.
ADRIENNE RICH
The lamb baa-ed vigorously as Mary dragged it into the manicure room, and Zel winced. She really sho...
SARAH BETH DURST
As long as that song plays, I get to put my hands on you, and I can’t guarantee I’m going to be ...
MEREDITH WILD
Just give me one night, Vanessa. One night, and I won’t let you regret it.
MEREDITH WILD
As I’ve said, encountering death has a way of jerking your priorities into line.
JAMES C. DOBSON
And ShadowClan holds power over there, in the darkest part of the forest. The elders say that the co...
ERIN HUNTER
I am so lonely without you, Aedan," Jane said simply.

"You truly want me?"

"Mo...
KAREN MARIE MONING
One way or another way it will happen..., until then make the correct choice. You don't want to go i...
DEYTH BANGER
I've been told
That it's not enough to
Wish for dreams, that I
Have to work them
JORDAN HOECHLIN
I needed to witness what it looked like when you eventually stopped asking questions and just starte...
HANNAH BRENCHER
You’re wondering whether this is a good idea. Because you’re smart and you see right through me,...
MEREDITH WILD
Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat.
ERIN HUNTER
So that's a fox?' Firepaw whispered. 'What an ugly muzzle!'
'You can say that again!' agreed Gr...
ERIN HUNTER
The alien was an ugly sight, all angles and corners. Like a pentagram might look if it fell into a m...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
But for many people, a huge part of the energy goes into the struggle with complexes, fear, worries,...
SUNDAY ADELAJA
We must continue research into new forms of energy and into more efficient use of existing energy so...
MAC THORNBERRY
What I was trying to say,” he whispered, “is that I see you in everything. There isn’t a word ...
VERONICA ROSSI
Fire can destroy, but it can also create-provide warmth, protection.
KATIE MCGARRY
Being born into the world is the greatest crapshoot there is.
KATIE MCGARRY
The affluent society, with relentless single-minded energy, is turning our cities, most of suburbia ...
ERIC SEVAREID
Without a clear-cut vision and a proper reading of the roadmap we may not reach the buoyant shores o...
ERIK PEVERNAGIE
There will never be a good time, financially, to get married, unless you're Shaq or Ray Romano. But ...
GREG BEHRENDT
If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted i...
MICHAEL J. TUCKER
Firepaw held the menacing amber gaze for few moments. Warrior and apprentice, for a heartbeat their ...
ERIN HUNTER
She asked him, to name the monster that he is most afraid of always and looked into his eyes in sile...
AKSHAY VASU
With breathtaking rapidity, we are destroying all that was lovely to look at and turning America int...
ERIC SEVAREID
You release the pain of the past and press on. It's a new day, and God is doing a new thing. He want...
CRAIG GROESCHEL
I travel to know where I fit into the world, and where I don’t.
CAREW PAPRITZ
There were so many forms of prehistoric technology.
Of those, men dig a few which fit into curr...
TOBA BETA
Why are you suggesting something… then deny to tell the whole thing?
DEYTH BANGER
The power of the work comes through this alchemical process in which the darkness is transmuted into...
WILLIAM KEEPIN
I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It i...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Hard to restrain, unstable is this mind; it flits wherever it lists. Good it is to control the mind....
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutiona...
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Everything has some consciousness, and we tap into that. It is about energy at its most basic level.
ROBERT MOOG
Every word is important. Every word of God is an energy and must be converted into inspiration and i...
SUNDAY ADELAJA
the truth will set u free but first it will piss u off
ALBERT BORRIS
Paul's one thing was committing to forget about the past, to forge ahead into the future.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
Spiritual love is a position of standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand exten...
CHRISTINA BALDWIN
If you pour everything you have into this life, this world, which is temporary and fading, you're je...
CRAIG GROESCHEL
One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy a...
SAM KEAN
And what good is a voice when so few will listen?
STACEY JAY
Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C.
Imagine how different those classrooms could be if hundreds of Nigeria's most talented recent gr...
WENDY KOPP
The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into ...
LEWIS MUMFORD
It's a tragic situation, ... The president is committed to doing everything he can to see that we ca...
COLIN POWELL
All the energy of their frustration and fear going into their laughter.
HUBERT SELBY JR.
Let your discomfort and pain push you into something new.
SUNDAY ADELAJA
Let the demand of life, lead you into the abundant supplies of life
SUNDAY ADELAJA
They had three cadences, these spectral drummers, which they called First Kings, Second Kings, and R...
HOWARD BAHR
God created us in his image, male and female, with personhood and sexual passions, so that when he c...
JOHN PIPER
Who are we if not the stories we pass down? What happens when there's no one left to tell those stor...
CARRIE RYAN
Anger - a beast within us that needs taming.
SARU SINGHAL
Pastor Smith did not have the religious constitution needed to provide salvation for any of us who�...
CHERYL R COWTAN
A lot of time, effort, energy and a lot of cooperative spirit has gone into identifying and selectin...
DON SCHONHARDT
We have tears in our eyes
As we wave our goodbyes,
We so loved being with you, we three. ROALD DAHL
Go out into the world, traveler. See what the long nights and hard days feel like, after a week of t...
KATHERINE ARDEN
[Yet so far, the creative energy has been mostly a grassroots affair.] It doesn't fit into how agenc...
GARY STEIN
When each and every believer rises up to serve others and function according to their capacity, the ...
HENRY HON
At the end of the warehouse was a dais constructed from pallets of books: stack of vampire novels, w...
RICK RIORDAN
Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic populariza...
WILLIAM GOLDING
For the most part, people think in ordinary life without bringing order into their thoughts. The gui...
RUDOLF STEINER
You must create energy into ideas and from an idea you must create pictures
SUNDAY ADELAJA
Part of what gives the show its energy is we paint ourselves into corners and blast our way out.
HOWARD GORDON
To be thrown upon one's own resources, is to be cast into the very lap of fortune; for our faculties...
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
To be thrown upon one's own resources, is to be cast into the very lap of fortune; for our faculties...
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
We pay a price for everything we get or take in this world; and although ambitions are well worth ha...
L.M. MONTGOMERY
Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, "W...
SHANNON L. ALDER
Percy was getting tired of water.
If he said that aloud, he would probably get kicked out of Po...
RICK RIORDAN
I can never believe how much time and energy and money and talent and everything else is being poure...
WALTER BECKER
If in barbed wire things can bloom, why couldn't I? I will not die, I will not die.
FRIEDL AND THE CHILDREN OF TEREZIN
(All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes...
JEAN SASSON
Writing creatively is a process of self-consumption that requires one to dive deeply inside of onese...
ASHIM SHANKER
Filling ourselves and living with the energy of love feels wonderful. And because this energy resona...
SUSAN BARBARA APOLLON
The amount of power freed by telling yourself you no longer choose to put energy into something can ...
PETER MCWILLIAMS
Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence an...
POLYBIUS
The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even m...
ZEENA SCHRECK
You must not have a royal lineage or be born into the families of generational wealth to be a succes...
SUNDAY ADELAJA
I don't know if I have a favorite color.
KATE MIDDLETON
It's very special having a new little girl.
KATE MIDDLETON
Yay!” Tyson went around the couches and gave everyone a big hug—even Octavian, who didn't look t...
RICK RIORDAN
Hazel!” he yelled. “That box! Open it!”
She hesitated, then saw the box he meant. Te labe...
RICK RIORDAN
If not for the horses, Piper would've died.
RICK RIORDAN
Pluto's pauldrons,” Reyna cursed.
RICK RIORDAN
Controlled deep breathing helps the body to transform the air we breathe into energy. The stream of ...
NANCY ZI
This bill is not an energy policy, ... It is a list of tax breaks and special interest favors that d...
EARL BLUMENAUER
...this cryptic game of hide-and-seek is what makes it one of the greatest historical mysteries. So ...
BRAD MELTZER
I look at myself, and I see a Spanish person who's trying to be understood by an English-speakin...
JAVIER BARDEM
The co-called moral compass is a part of the human cognition, and when that compass comes into actio...
ABHIJIT NASKAR
I'm so proud of these kids. To play for J.L. Mann, you've gotta have your head, heart and both feet ...
DARAH HUFFMAN
What I am most proud of is the legacy of hope that FIFA and football leaves around the world. It mak...
SEPP BLATTER
Foreboding” might have been the appropriate word. “Dread.” The PROMISE of fear. It was tangibl...
JAKE VANDER-ARK
When I’m with you, even my past seems like a bad dream,” he says. “I’ve sat on this hill a h...
KATIE MCGARRY

More Susan Sontag

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considere...
SUSAN SONTAG
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
SUSAN SONTAG
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write...
SUSAN SONTAG
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precio...
SUSAN SONTAG
It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the fin...
SUSAN SONTAG
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating th...
SUSAN SONTAG
War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is,...
SUSAN SONTAG
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...
SUSAN SONTAG
Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate...
SUSAN SONTAG
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of A...
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own expe...
SUSAN SONTAG
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the ra...
SUSAN SONTAG
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading towa...
SUSAN SONTAG
What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
SUSAN SONTAG
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
SUSAN SONTAG
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The questio...
SUSAN SONTAG
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

[Speech upon being awa...
SUSAN SONTAG
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
SUSAN SONTAG
Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more ...
SUSAN SONTAG
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
SUSAN SONTAG
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. I...
SUSAN SONTAG
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e...
SUSAN SONTAG
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
SUSAN SONTAG
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less inter...
SUSAN SONTAG
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontroll...
SUSAN SONTAG
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
SUSAN SONTAG
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be ...
SUSAN SONTAG
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
SUSAN SONTAG
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
SUSAN SONTAG
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
SUSAN SONTAG
In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
SUSAN SONTAG
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o...
SUSAN SONTAG
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...
SUSAN SONTAG
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
SUSAN SONTAG
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu...
SUSAN SONTAG
Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative...
SUSAN SONTAG
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
SUSAN SONTAG
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the...
SUSAN SONTAG
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men...
SUSAN SONTAG
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,...
SUSAN SONTAG
Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
SUSAN SONTAG
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting...
SUSAN SONTAG
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,...
SUSAN SONTAG
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ...
SUSAN SONTAG
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder...
SUSAN SONTAG
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa...
SUSAN SONTAG
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
SUSAN SONTAG
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG
Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us...
SUSAN SONTAG
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n...
SUSAN SONTAG
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ...
SUSAN SONTAG
What we need is to use what we have.
SUSAN SONTAG
Sanity is a cozy lie.
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
SUSAN SONTAG
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,...
SUSAN SONTAG
The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and...
SUSAN SONTAG
Taste has no system and no proofs.
SUSAN SONTAG
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture...
SUSAN SONTAG
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves....
SUSAN SONTAG
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o...
SUSAN SONTAG
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kind...
SUSAN SONTAG
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
SUSAN SONTAG
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability....
SUSAN SONTAG
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people t...
SUSAN SONTAG
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
SUSAN SONTAG
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
SUSAN SONTAG
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of...
SUSAN SONTAG
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
SUSAN SONTAG
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
SUSAN SONTAG
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists...
SUSAN SONTAG
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
SUSAN SONTAG
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine w...
SUSAN SONTAG
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less intere...
SUSAN SONTAG
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the s...
SUSAN SONTAG
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured m...
SUSAN SONTAG
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
SUSAN SONTAG
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wis...
SUSAN SONTAG
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
SUSAN SONTAG
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
SUSAN SONTAG
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past...
SUSAN SONTAG
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, th...
SUSAN SONTAG
My library is an archive of longings.
SUSAN SONTAG
We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the cal...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper...
SUSAN SONTAG
We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if n...
SUSAN SONTAG
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...
SUSAN SONTAG
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after yea...
SUSAN SONTAG
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams
SUSAN SONTAG
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really h...
SUSAN SONTAG
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p...
SUSAN SONTAG
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on va...
SUSAN SONTAG
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an ind...
SUSAN SONTAG
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to w...
SUSAN SONTAG
Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
SUSAN SONTAG
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational term...
SUSAN SONTAG
The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in...
SUSAN SONTAG
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p...
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
SUSAN SONTAG
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remai...
SUSAN SONTAG
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a pass...
SUSAN SONTAG
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exagge...
SUSAN SONTAG
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love o...
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not the position, but the disposition.
SUSAN SONTAG
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions
SUSAN SONTAG
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by...
SUSAN SONTAG
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Pre...
SUSAN SONTAG
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
SUSAN SONTAG
Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l...
SUSAN SONTAG
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
SUSAN SONTAG
All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memor...
SUSAN SONTAG
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion o...
SUSAN SONTAG
American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
SUSAN SONTAG
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or t...
SUSAN SONTAG
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
SUSAN SONTAG
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citiz...
SUSAN SONTAG
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [...
SUSAN SONTAG
People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens...
SUSAN SONTAG
So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympath...
SUSAN SONTAG
All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If ...
SUSAN SONTAG
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which doe...
SUSAN SONTAG
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs ar...
SUSAN SONTAG
Desire has no history...
SUSAN SONTAG
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism...
SUSAN SONTAG
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--on...
SUSAN SONTAG
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics...
SUSAN SONTAG
Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri...
SUSAN SONTAG
How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!
SUSAN SONTAG
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel...
SUSAN SONTAG
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ...
SUSAN SONTAG
I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
SUSAN SONTAG
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c...
SUSAN SONTAG
[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.
SUSAN SONTAG
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
SUSAN SONTAG
Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo...
SUSAN SONTAG
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
SUSAN SONTAG
Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extensi...
SUSAN SONTAG
Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
SUSAN SONTAG
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read...
SUSAN SONTAG
All photographs are memento mori.
SUSAN SONTAG
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper...
SUSAN SONTAG
The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual dis...
SUSAN SONTAG
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize,
SUSAN SONTAG
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
SUSAN SONTAG
This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of b...
SUSAN SONTAG
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG
It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow t...
SUSAN SONTAG
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged,...
SUSAN SONTAG
The Way We Live Now
SUSAN SONTAG
Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that...
SUSAN SONTAG
In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of styli...
SUSAN SONTAG
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
SUSAN SONTAG
With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
SUSAN SONTAG
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "vi...
SUSAN SONTAG
Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to det...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by ne...
SUSAN SONTAG
It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking...
SUSAN SONTAG
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo...
SUSAN SONTAG
Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled re...
SUSAN SONTAG
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other pe...
SUSAN SONTAG
One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The na...
SUSAN SONTAG
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations...
SUSAN SONTAG
[Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste...
SUSAN SONTAG
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
SUSAN SONTAG
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG
Perversity is the muse of modern literature
SUSAN SONTAG
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual ...
SUSAN SONTAG
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
SUSAN SONTAG
My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything,'
SUSAN SONTAG
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them
SUSAN SONTAG
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of...
SUSAN SONTAG
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
SUSAN SONTAG
A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. ...
SUSAN SONTAG