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

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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 realm—such 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...
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
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The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
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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...
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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