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
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