Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.


Susan Sontag

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

Related

To be, or not to be, that is the question.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
JEAN-LUC GODARD
I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, n...
AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS
Do I have the courage of being a ruthless man to myself with the complete knowledge on my manner or ...
FEREIDOON YAZDI
PEACE IS THE OBJECTIVE TO WAR, BUT THE BLOOD RUNNETH STILL
NATALIE URQUIETA
Kindness is universal. Sometimes being kind allows others to see the goodness in humanity through yo...
GERMANY KENT
To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be.
GOLDA MEIR
To be mad is worse than not to be if this is what it is.
JOHNNY RICH
Hamlet's Cat's Soliloquy

"To go outside, and there perchance to stay
Or to re...
HENRY N. BEARD
To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.
TOM ROBBINS
The love you get, is equal to the love you give.
BEN OAK
Be kind. We never know what people are going through. Give grace and mercy because one day your circ...
GERMANY KENT
Sheep don’t need the shepherd to be what they are. The shepherd needs sheep to be what he is.
LJUPKA CVETANOVA
To date or not to date that is the question. It's almost as important as Shakespeare's to be...
AL GOLDSTEIN
35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give...
JAMES C. DOBSON
Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY
37. It is better to be single and unhappy than unhappily married.
JAMES C. DOBSON
I know that David Tennant's Hamlet isn't till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who ...
NEIL GAIMAN
Friendship is a double-edged sword one side it can be great and true but the other side it spells be...
GARY F EVANS...
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surpr...
C.S. LEWIS
I think that many people will intentionally overlook all of the lifeless facts about their relations...
C. JOYBELL C.
To search the sands of a lost desert for truth and justice in this world today you might as well be ...
GARY F EVANS...
Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it appears to be.
JEFFREY FRY
I hate that just because you happen to be good at something,people automatically think that's what m...
AMBER SMITH
The most attractive thing about you should have less to do with your face or body and more to do wit...
GERMANY KENT
Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
J.R. RIM
The sad heart needs work to do.
JOAN BAUER
Most powerful of all powers in its holy insinuation is _being_. _To be_ is more powerful than even _...
GEORGE MACDONALD
You know that we've got a few problems we need to talk through before we get married."

"I...
SUSAN ELIZABETH PHILLIPS
I was emotional. I wanted to be taken seriously. I was pretty emo. I was reciting Shakespeare monolo...
CONSTANCE WU
To be rich simply means,to be able to meet people's need.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
when your heart touched mine,I knew then we were one.
THERESA M WILSON
To be rich simply means to be beneficial to others.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
More than any woman I ever knew, she comforted.' -Mrs. Huxley about Emma
DEBORAH HEILIGMAN
That's silly,' said Martha. 'Friends should always tell each other the truth.
JAMES MARSHALL
Kindness is the essence of greatness and the fundamental characteristic of the noblest men and women...
JOSEPH B. WIRTHLIN
In this long eternal quest to be more like our Savior, may we try to be “perfect” men and women ...
JEFFREY R. HOLLAND
And we learned that you don't have to be famous or rich or physically healthy to be a leader. You ju...
JOAN BAUER
There is no tomorrow to remember if we don’t do something today, and to live most fully today, we ...
THOMAS S. MONSON
Beauty—real everlasting beauty—lives not on our faces, but in our attitude and our actions. It l...
JUSTINA CHEN
Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls i...
JOSEPH CONRAD
How do you know if something is real? That’s easy. Does it change you? Does it form you? Does it g...
C. JOYBELL C.
Reach out and help others. If you have the power to make someone happy, do it. Be a vessel, be the c...
GERMANY KENT
To love is to act.
VICTOR HUGO
War is no solution to peace.
BEN OAK
When our lips parted, he sighed. “I love those eyes, angel. When they look at me, I feel like anyt...
BIJOU HUNTER
It is better to be a pragmatist than a lunatic.
DEBASISH MRIDHA
Congratulations, to the people which made gotham series, still need some more and extra work!
DEYTH BANGER
To have the cognitive abilities to do research and development is vital to a forever expanding world...
GARY F EVANS...
The first and foremost human right or fundamental right is the right to exist.
APURVA GAGLANI
If we ever put research into what the subconscious is we could probably come to the conclusion that ...
GARY F EVANS...
i know im not the girl you wanted. not the one you want to hear from. but what you see is what you g...
SIMI GREWAL
Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that....
JOHN GREEN
The market is still waiting for HSBC results, which will have a big impact on the direction of the m...
ANDREW TO
Property shares had a technical rebound, but interest rate concerns will still affect properties unt...
ANDREW TO
Bank of China's results were quite good; double-digit growth can be taken as good results for a bank...
ANDREW TO
The index tried to challenge 18,000 but failed, so that triggered profit taking. Tokyo's slide also ...
ANDREW TO
Trading seems to be focusing on selective counters because investors are cautious amid interest rate...
ANDREW TO
We're seeing a minor technical rebound after Wall Street rebounded from two days of losses. The key ...
ANDREW TO
Some investors have returned to pick up the stock at bargain prices.
ANDREW TO
I think the take-up for the placement is not too good and other property developers may be discourag...
ANDREW TO
We are afraid that our freedoms and liberties will be infringed in the future.
ANDREW TO
I think there was some minor selling pressure on telecom stocks as the market continued to see a wea...
ANDREW TO
And I knew that it was possible he wasn't entirely right for me, but I also knew, in some way...
CATHERINE LACEY
Shaq pe hai yaqeen unko,
Yaqeen pe hai shaq Mujhy.....
.....Kis ka jhoot jhoot hai,
K...
VISHAL BHARADWAJ - HAIDER FILM
We are far from perfect but willing to be different.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
How should I know?" said Alice, surprised at her own courage. "It's no business of mine."
The Q...
LEWIS CARROLL
A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung...
PETER WESSEL ZAPFFE
Not everyone has the time to be normal.
LJUPKA CVETANOVA
It's a a damn good day to be alive.
MICHAEL CLIFFORD
Remember that yours is not the only heart that may be wishing for love.
CAMERON DOKEY
Tell your story to the universe and Let your actions speak LOVE.' No matter what it is.
NAPZ CHERUB PELLAZO
Meant to be" allows for lazy. The idea of destiny alleviates anxiety; it comforts us. We stop believ...
STEPHANIE KLEIN
What if you are wrong? What if the gods sent you, and indeed the rest of us, not because we were nev...
MARIE LU
If you were to ask everyone what 'Hamlet' was about, they might say, "It's about a ...
ORLANDO BLOOM
How to be wealthy;Birth an idea & then take it to the market place & believe that the market place w...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
It's a sheer and an utter nonsense to even think or imagine that a person can gain and retain people...
ANUJ SOMANY
How to be perfect;Think nothing,say nothing & do nothing.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
How to be Great;The moment you realize & accept the ordinary fact that those doing great things toda...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
How to be great;Think of a gigantic & unheard of idea to birth & nurture & inside it lies your great...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
Stay true to yourself.Take everyday challenge in your stride & strive to make journey of life exactl...
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA
Be true to yourself.Give wings of confidence & courage to your endeavour. Your strength is reflected...
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA
Like the vital rudder of a ship, we have been provided a way to determine the direction we travel. T...
THOMAS S. MONSON
Be true to yourself.Let your belief & thoughts for right cause are not compromised at any cost thoug...
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA
Just because you love someone doesn't mean you're meant to be together.
MICHAELA D.
If you can put your mind to it anything can be achieved but to pull something out of nothing althoug...
GARY F EVANS...
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the p...
EPICTETUS
We must be more and more to each other, my dear wife.' -Charles Darwin to wife Emma upon loss of dau...
DEBORAH HEILIGMAN
I wish you knew how I value you; and what an inexpressible blessing it is to have one whom one can a...
DEBORAH HEILIGMAN
Honesty is a complex and tricky thing, and we don't want to be honest all the time.
DAN ARIELY
Everything we do really is just a little marker on the long road to death. And sometimes that’s ov...
JOSS WHEDON
I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t...
SALLY MANN
Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it?...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say...
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
Be yourself. An original is worth more than a copy.

Style is King, 2008.
SUZY KASSEM
The saying sell all your belongings & give to the poor simply means "Redirect your mind to the verit...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.
ERIC ROTH
You're afraid of getting hurt like I'm afraid to die. It doesn't mean I'm not going to live every da...
VI KEELAND
Wesley Rush doesn't chase girls, but I'm chasing you.
KODY KEPLINGER
I turn and kick with the first one and feel myself being lifted and thrown towards the beach. It's l...
MARK SMITH

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
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