Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.
Susan Sontag
Related 28. Feelings are neither right nor wrong. It's what you do with them that causes the problems. JAMES C. DOBSON Millions of people acknowledge today that they do not know the meaning of life. JAMES C. DOBSON Do the thing and you will have the power. RALPH WALDO EMERSON Life is weird and wonderful like that, is it not. SONYA.E.WILLIAMS Each day I will accomplish one thing on my to do list. LAILAH GIFTY AKITA We react in a way that has nothing do to with who we are or what our experiences have been, JAMES DINES You have what others don't have. This is good news which means you can do what others can't do! You ... ISRAELMORE AYIVOR If you love someone you must set them free like the wind and give them the respect they deserve.If y... GARY F EVANS... Don’t we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody ... DAN PEARCE What is it that makes you so angry, bothers you so deeply, that you're compelled to act? CRAIG GROESCHEL Most powerful of all powers in its holy insinuation is _being_. _To be_ is more powerful than even _... GEORGE MACDONALD One of the best things you can do in life is to embrace who you are. Once you do that NOTHING can st... OSCAR AULIQ-ICE If therefore you shall be remembered for what you did with what you had more than what you had, use ... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH What humility does for one is it reminds us that there are people before me. I have already been pai... MAYA ANGELOU When you only get one hit and you don't score a run, there's nothing you can do about it on defense ... BETH BEHRINGER In order to honor God with your wealth, you first have to admit that you are rich. Most people won't... CRAIG GROESCHEL Stand for something. Make your life mean something. Start where you are with what you have. You are ... GERMANY KENT Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry, an... LAURIE BUCHANAN, PHD Sometimes shit's gotta be done and I just fuckin' do it! MANUEL MONGRAIN To learn who a person truly is, watch what they do when they are broken down and reduced to nothing.... MATT GANNON We can play now… just do that and that little piece of kinky thoughts… few perverts add and you ... DEYTH BANGER There is nothing worse than having an enemy who is a total loser. It's incredibly frustrating when s... ASHLY LORENZANA We want this to be an experience that they try, and if they enjoy it, they can stick with it. We do ... BOB ALEXANDER People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge... NICCOLò MACHIAVELLI Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it become... AUDREY HEPBURN I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix. DEYTH BANGER I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change... STEPHEN HAWKING 19. Those who are the happiest are not necessarily those for whom life has been easiest. Emotional s... JAMES C. DOBSON That's why we seize the moment try to freeze it and own it, squeeze it and hold it. EMINEM All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom w... JOAN DIDION We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab and you had no warning. It... COLSON WHITEHEAD Do. Then talk. In that order. SOTERO M LOPEZ II Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed wh... SIMONE WEIL Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed w... SIMONE WEIL In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep ove... CORMAC MCCARTHY I think it's very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their nam... MELINDA GATES What Fucks me... is that we both are the same... we all walk on the same path... but everything is a... DEYTH BANGER What matters is the one thing I do know for certain: God is with me. CRAIG GROESCHEL Food Allergies Are Not Due to Food, Rather Are Due to the Constant Contamination of That Food That Y... THEHEALTHFOODGURU It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this worl... SARAH ORNE JEWETT The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then... TOM ROBBINS We have to get better every day. If we can do that, if we can keep winning games and keep gaining co... CHAD AMBUEHL The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers a... ARUNDHATI ROY How can we know that what Jesus has shown us of God is the truth; or how do we know when we look int... R. J. CAMPBELL Animals, they are one of the most beautiful gifts we have and, you know, if there are people that ha... ALYSSA MILANO Everyone has a gift. It's up to you to decide what you do with it. ANTHONY T. HINCKS What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheri... SAM HARRIS If you have to boast about what you do for a living to attract attention, attraction or approval, th... DONNA LYNN HOPE If it's what you do and you can do it, then you do it. VAN MORRISON I think the biggest challenge for Somalia has been the sense that it is a hopeless case of incompreh... JAN EGELAND The Biggest Threat to our Democracy, Freedoms and Future is Leadership that fosters and Appeases the... MICHAEL HARRIS What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, howev... ROBIN MCKINLEY There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came ... C.S. LEWIS So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do a... URSULA K. LE GUIN I've been told (that) about every district has children who won't be in school because of this. Supe... JODY SIEGLE If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should hav... THOMAS JEFFERSON People are attracted to who we are more than what we do. LORRIN L. LEE The question is: What can we do for less money? What can we do for the man who has $200,000? ... We'... DAVID POTTRUCK What we are really looking to do here is not just tinker around the edges, but to deliver a comprehe... JASON GOLDBERG I cannot continue to live a life I am not born to live! I cannot continue to exert my full strength ... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH Ignoring is what you are supposed to do with bullies, so they get bored and leave you alone. But the... PAUL MURRAY The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surpr... C.S. LEWIS If we ever put research into what the subconscious is we could probably come to the conclusion that ... GARY F EVANS... There is absolutely nothing we can do to control that or affect that other than go play well against... FRANK BEAMER The real loser is someone who tries nothing and does nothing SOTONYE ANGA Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who ar... VICTOR HUGO Aerodynamically there isn’t much you can do to enhance your Beetle’s handling. The Porsche style... CHRISTINA ENGELA We need to do a better job of understanding who it is we seek to serve, what their particular needs ... GEORGE SMITHERMAN If there's room to make a record every year, and it sounds nothing like the old one, I might do ... SAM DEW What I conclude is that religion has nothing to do with experience or reason but with deep and irrat... RICHARD TAYLOR Do you want to know how they get the addresses? ... They drive through the city and get any address ... CARLOS PEREZ Tipping points are so dangerous because if you pass them, the climate is out of humanity's contr... JAMES HANSEN Letting teams back into games that we should be closing out has nothing to do with who we are playin... JOE AIELLO I don't think anybody can be a success who doesn't like what they do. [But it's] no job if it has no... MALCOLM S. FORBES 37. It is better to be single and unhappy than unhappily married. JAMES C. DOBSON A big sacrifice is coming, and you won't have the courage to make it. That will cost you dearly. It ... RICK RIORDAN We believe because it gives us faith. It gives us the willingness to go through our day, to keep the... TARUN BETALA Success is a Journey: so, don’t forget to pack your COURAGE: to face the obstacles heading your wa... PHILIP T. M. The less instructed atheist will ask whether God can make a weight so heavy that He cannot lift it, ... FRANK SHEED Georgia has been on top of their game, but I think that each one of us are going out there to do wha... KATIE HARDMAN There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One ... MARY BALOGH Consciousness that is not translated into appropriate action is a betrayal of consciousness . . . Li... NATHANIEL BRANDEN Man must be in space - that is what we are destined for. There is nothing else that we can do. MAJEL BARRETT Destiny consist in the moments that we experienced, and not in the choices we have to do. DANIEL MELGAçO It must be something voluntary, something self induced - like getting drunk, or talking yourself int... ALDOUS HUXLEY If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is, th... THOMAS JEFFERSON If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is tha... THOMAS JEFFERSON Tomorrow is promised to no one. Prioritize today accordingly. GINA GREENLEE We today need to take a leap of faith that if we make this decision today, we're going to push kids ... DORIE COMBS The universe is so vast, so immense, we can never expect to explore it all. It is in effect, not so ... CHRISTINA ENGELA Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothi... C.S. LEWIS Most people talk; we do things. They plan; we achieve. They hesitate; we move ahead. We are living p... MOHAMMED BIN RASHID AL MAKTOUM Of course we do, ... I know that it is going to be difficult, but we are by no means out of it. Our ... DENNIS SETZER Talent is no accident of birth. In today's society a good many people seem to have the idea that if ... SHINICHI SUZUKI You don't tell an astronaut what to do. ATMOSPHERE It is what it is, it is what you make it. JAMES DURBIN I think it would be a waste. Why would you do that? The coach had nothing to do with dropped balls, ... JARROD COOPER We both know... that soon everything is going to end... ... This chat will be in the... DEYTH BANGER Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care mor... MARGARET THATCHER Everyone always says how I'm so smart, but they don't know what it's like being me. always feeling l... SUSANE COLASANTI
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... 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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 A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world." [Speech upon being awa... SUSAN SONTAG Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. SUSAN SONTAG Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more ... SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou... SUSAN SONTAG Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. I... SUSAN SONTAG Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e... SUSAN SONTAG The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. SUSAN SONTAG The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less inter... SUSAN SONTAG In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents ... SUSAN SONTAG The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontroll... SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. SUSAN SONTAG Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be ... SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char... SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ... SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s... SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature. SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ... SUSAN SONTAG Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. SUSAN SONTAG In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o... SUSAN SONTAG Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub... SUSAN SONTAG What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu... SUSAN SONTAG Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative... SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou... SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the... SUSAN SONTAG Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men... SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits. SUSAN SONTAG We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting... SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,... SUSAN SONTAG AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ... SUSAN SONTAG AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder... SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa... SUSAN SONTAG Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us... SUSAN SONTAG Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n... SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ... SUSAN SONTAG What we need is to use what we have. SUSAN SONTAG Sanity is a cozy lie. SUSAN SONTAG It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,... SUSAN SONTAG The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and... SUSAN SONTAG Taste has no system and no proofs. SUSAN SONTAG The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture... SUSAN SONTAG One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o... SUSAN SONTAG I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kind... SUSAN SONTAG Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability.... SUSAN SONTAG As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people t... SUSAN SONTAG Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. SUSAN SONTAG The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. SUSAN SONTAG The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of... SUSAN SONTAG I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. SUSAN SONTAG The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions. SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. SUSAN SONTAG Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists... SUSAN SONTAG Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech. SUSAN SONTAG What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine w... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less intere... SUSAN SONTAG Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the s... SUSAN SONTAG For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ... SUSAN SONTAG The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured m... SUSAN SONTAG To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. SUSAN SONTAG The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wis... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. SUSAN SONTAG Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc... SUSAN SONTAG Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past... SUSAN SONTAG Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, th... SUSAN SONTAG My library is an archive of longings. SUSAN SONTAG We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the cal... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper... SUSAN SONTAG We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if n... SUSAN SONTAG Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the... SUSAN SONTAG Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after yea... SUSAN SONTAG I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams SUSAN SONTAG I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really h... SUSAN SONTAG Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p... SUSAN SONTAG Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on va... SUSAN SONTAG Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an ind... SUSAN SONTAG Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to w... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms. SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational term... SUSAN SONTAG The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in... SUSAN SONTAG Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p... SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle... SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remai... SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a pass... SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exagge... SUSAN SONTAG 'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love o... SUSAN SONTAG It is not the position, but the disposition. SUSAN SONTAG The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions SUSAN SONTAG Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by... SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Pre... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. SUSAN SONTAG Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l... SUSAN SONTAG Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. SUSAN SONTAG All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memor... SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion o... SUSAN SONTAG American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed ... SUSAN SONTAG Today everything exists to end in a photograph. SUSAN SONTAG All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or t... SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s... SUSAN SONTAG Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citiz... SUSAN SONTAG Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [... SUSAN SONTAG People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens... SUSAN SONTAG So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympath... SUSAN SONTAG All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If ... SUSAN SONTAG To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which doe... SUSAN SONTAG Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs ar... SUSAN SONTAG Desire has no history... SUSAN SONTAG Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--on... SUSAN SONTAG Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics... SUSAN SONTAG Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri... SUSAN SONTAG How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion! SUSAN SONTAG As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel... SUSAN SONTAG Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ... SUSAN SONTAG I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. SUSAN SONTAG Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c... SUSAN SONTAG [O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing. SUSAN SONTAG Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe... SUSAN SONTAG Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo... SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is an elementary means of self-defense. SUSAN SONTAG Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extensi... SUSAN SONTAG Rules of taste enforce structures of power. SUSAN SONTAG Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read... SUSAN SONTAG All photographs are memento mori. SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper... SUSAN SONTAG The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual dis... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize, SUSAN SONTAG Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc... SUSAN SONTAG This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of b... SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow t... SUSAN SONTAG A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is ... SUSAN SONTAG The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged,... SUSAN SONTAG The Way We Live Now SUSAN SONTAG Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that... SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of styli... SUSAN SONTAG He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser. SUSAN SONTAG With more people, there are more voices to tune out. SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. SUSAN SONTAG Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "vi... SUSAN SONTAG Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to det... SUSAN SONTAG The aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by ne... SUSAN SONTAG It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking... SUSAN SONTAG But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo... SUSAN SONTAG Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled re... SUSAN SONTAG It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other pe... SUSAN SONTAG One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The na... SUSAN SONTAG The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations... SUSAN SONTAG [Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A ... SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ... SUSAN SONTAG The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste... SUSAN SONTAG Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual ... SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou... SUSAN SONTAG My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything,' SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them SUSAN SONTAG The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of... SUSAN SONTAG Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. SUSAN SONTAG A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. ... SUSAN SONTAG