As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Susan Sontag
Related How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no oth... THOMAS JEFFERSON My goal has always been to help people help themselves. Your body is your most priceless possession;... JACK LALANNE Most people take health at face value. Quite often people understand that health is the most valuabl... ERALDO BANOVAC Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no... GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no... G. W. F. HEGEL The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anyt... ANDREW CARNEGIE Let him who walks in darkness and no light trust in the name of the Lord and rely on his God PEOPLE OF CHRIST The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anyt... ANDREW CARNEGIE Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag. SUSAN SONTAG Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the pe... ROBERT REICH Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the peo... ROBERT REICH People earnestly seeking what they do not want, while they neglect the real blessings in their posse... MARY WORLEY MONTAGU Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of ... JIMMY CARTER The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to peop... PAUL DIRAC She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Those people that work up in that building, they get paid and they get paid on time. They get paid w... BERTHA LEWIS Once we recognize the fact that every individual is a treasury of hidden and unsuspected qualities, ... CHARLES H. PERCY Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars,... FRANCIS BACON The reason I do photographs is to help people understand my music, so it's very important that I... BJORK As a rule of thumb, we give 10 days for them to move out if they are found to be in possession of dr... FRANK ANDERSON The only people who get possessed are those who are open to the possibility of possession. BERNARD H. POWELL I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become... LAURENCE HOUSMAN The Prussian Sovereigns are in possession of a crown not be the
grace of the people, but by God's g... KARL OTTO VON SCHONHAUSEN BISMARCK We now have evidence that Saddam Hussein is in possession of cartoon trucks. Because (they) are cart... NEAL POLLACK The people are unreal. The flowers are unreal, they don't smell. The food is unreal, it doesn't tast... ETHEL BARRYMORE People run out of space and they are looking for somewhere to send them. So they give us a call. DAVE JESSOP I'm more a possession receiver. I also make big plays. I help keep the receivers intact as far as be... ANTWUN WILLIAMS People in the most vulnerable areas clearly anticipated their cars, like their homes, would be at ri... BOB STEIN There are different kinds of love, but they all have the same aim: possession ANDRE GIDE Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society ma... NAOMI WOLF India was and to some extent, still is, a nation where its citizens care more about their religious ... ABHIJIT NASKAR Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky... JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky... JOHANN VON GOETHE Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ... CAITLIN MORAN Human being are gold, the greatest possession you can possess in life is having people around you. FAGBAYIMU SAMSON ADEOLA We will definitely work on our defensive positioning and how we can prevent those runs. We will also... GLENN MCANNINCH I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t... SALLY MANN There are thousands of people who have been buried without any indication that they ever lived, whic... SALLY ZINMAN Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. JOHN LENNON We also have a specialty leasing program to help small businesses get started, ... We can help someo... DONNA GREEN Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-posses... GEORGE BATAILLE Freedom of choice is more to be treasured than any possession earth can give. DAVID O. MCKAY Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a... SALMAN RUSHDIE I thought psychologists were people who rob, figuratively of course, money from the insecure. But th... GIANLUIGI BUFFON I mistrust the satisfaction which makes a display of the possession of Infinity; that is called fatu... EDGAR QUINET Our goal was to give them one shot per possession. We did a good job of that. They got some points i... GREG AMUNDSON I just think it's shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned ... PAT ROBERTSON There was a pistol on the right front seat -- none of the occupants claimed ownership of it, ... The... HOWARD SAFIR Not everyone asks for the reward. They are not necessarily even seeking the reward. I think that is ... JENNY BLANK Some discussion of the nature and temperament of the fairies is necessary in view of its possible be... LEWIS SPENCE The lands granted were in the occupancy of savages and situated in a wilderness, of which the govern... WILLIAM H. WHARTON Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you. ANDRE GIDE Words are most malignant, the most treacherous possession of mankind. They are saturated with the so... LOUIS SULLIVAN A lot of people in spiritual life use the awareness of difference, and the spiritual glorification o... ANDREW COHEN Millions of people acknowledge today that they do not know the meaning of life. JAMES C. DOBSON Organizations are realizing they can move opportunities into the virtual realmsuch as mentoring or... JASON WILLETT Let not ambition take possession of you; love the friends of the people, but reserve blind submissio... MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE We try to grab pieces of our lives as they speed past us. Photographs freeze those pieces and help u... GENE MCSWEENEY It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and tha... THOMAS HARDY It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and tha... THOMAS HARDY Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami... CAITLIN MORAN We are God's chosen people. We are God's treasured possession. Let us rise in mighty stren... LAILAH GIFTY AKITA The possession of a perfect knowledge of your business is an absolute necessity in order to insure s... P.T. BARNUM [About Susan Sontag] Her quest for meaning, for significance was endless. She described life more as... MICHAEL SILVERBLATT You leaders, where do you lead your people to? Do you sow in them the seed of possession? SUNDAY ADELAJA Let me tell you that the children from their very birth are born to evil. Satan seems to have contro... ELLEN G. WHITE No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it. JAMES A. BALDWIN No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it. JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The greatest possession is Self-possession ETHEL WATTS MUMFORD The greatest possession is self-possession. ETHEL WATTS MUMFORD The strikers' actions were violent and Solidarity is in possession of photographs showing the extent... JAHNI COWLEY The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher posses... PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of truth JOHN LOCKE Overall we've improved in ball possession which is one of the areas we wanted to work at. FRANK CHRISTY To have entities in an aura
(possession) is akin
to being a landlord
in a house with locked rooms
to... O ANNA NIEMUS If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of fre... MADELEINE L'ENGLE For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the... EMMA DONOGHUE She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but... ERIC HOFFER It is almost an unbearable pain, to suddenly recognize the value of what you had being ignorant of w... SUNDAY ADELAJA It is a truth universally acknowledged that a married man in possession of a good fortune must be in... JULIA QUINN Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows ... ALISON GOPNIK But now we've finally taken full possession of what is rightfully ours, because everyone must feel t... NEAL SHUSTERMAN It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of the tr... JOHN LOCKE The best way to have in abundance is to give in essence. There is great possession in charity. ADEWALE OSUNSAKIN People who act the most arrogant often are the most insecure, and they just can't even begin to ... MATT MCGORRY I tell you about a fact and truth. In physical reality of matter, there's no such thing as an ... TOBA BETA For them to linger as long as they did, which usually means they don't have irrefutable evidence, an... BRIAN BILLICK possession which cloys man, only increases the affection of woman MATTHEW LEWIS Whoever resorts regularly to the lessons of Holy Scripture as an apt pupil will take the Savior into... EDITH STEIN Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman i... MARQUIS DE SADE You've got to take it one possession at a time, and you can't make mistakes against them or they'll ... DUSTIN VILLEPIGUE Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, ... MADELEINE L'ENGLE Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is ... GEORGE WASHINGTON Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine ed... KATHARINE ELIZABETH FULLERTON GEROULD They're a good football team. They have a lot of experience on offense, and it showed on that last p... JOHN HORNER We did not play as smart as you have to play playing a top 25 team, suffice to say. You've got to pl... DAVE ODOM The work force is the first and foremost priority -- making sure that they are safe, and that they a... KYLE HERRING Wherever there is possession of marks, there is fraud ; wherever there is no-possession of no-marks,... BUDDHA Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. JOHN LENNON
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 American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chro... 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 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