FastSaying

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.


Susan Sontag

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Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye
FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or...
ANONYMOUS There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state ...
ALEXANDRE DUMAS Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability ...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN What kind of spiritual triumph it was I can neither write nor speak; it can only be compared with th...
JACOB BOEHME For I am convinced that neither death nor life neither angels nor demons neither the present nor the...
ANONYMOUS She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT [About Susan Sontag] Her quest for meaning, for significance was endless. She described life more as...
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Honor from death,” I snap, “is a myth. Invented by the war torn to make sense of the horrific. I...
RAE CARSON There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's...
GUY ALMES Death is not an ending. It is a transformation. Death is the threshold of this life. Beyond it is so...
MING-DAO DENG Death is the only thing that can not be explained truly. It is the only means for a true fallacy.
EPHDAN Most ordinary members of the public... neither understand nor care about the ratings battle, we of c...
IAN FRASER Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death...
D.H. LAWRENCE One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and bo...
LANCE MORROW It (his death) is something that cannot be celebrated, because he departs with the truth about many,
STEVE BIKO Death does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not go...
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI Those who have lived a good life do not fear death, but meet it calmly, and even long for it in the ...
SOURCE UNKNOWN Death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down. The difference between sex and...
WOODY ALLEN In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death i...
PAUL AUSTER Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence.
OLIVER JOSEPH LODGE For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.
EPICTETUS We die a day at a time
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA Death is not the worst thing; rather, when one who craves death cannot attain even that wish.
SOPHOCLES If there was no such thing as death, men would scarcely live. The human race thrives on the fear of ...
KIRPA RAI But that means that the Eucharist is far more than just a meal; it has cost a death to provide it, a...
JOSEPH RATZINGER Give the peasants neither life nor death.
IEYASU TOKUGAWA I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it's a mystery and it will always be a myst...
BETH GIBBONS Each man lives in his own universe and when he dies the world is over
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA Those too impressed with material things cannot hold their place n the world of culture; they are re...
ALEXANDER CRUMMELL There was neither death nor immortality then. There was not distinction of day or night. That alone ...
RIG VEDA I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it's a mystery and it will always be a ...
BETH GIBBONS Death, after all, is the common expectation from birth. Neither heroes nor cowards can escape it.
ELLIS PETERS Though we are terrorized by death, it's not different from birth, it just happens
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA To those who have neither public nor private affections, the excitements of life are much curtailed,...
JOHN STUART MILL Don't be scared to death of death til death. LIVE.
CALEB FLORA Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds
BUDDHA BUDDHA Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds
BUDDHA Only those who live a full, fun-filled, and happy life have no regrets or fear of death.
LORRIN L. LEE If a God, he could not suffer death, for immortality cannot die, and as a man his death could be no ...
THOMAS PAINE The only thing more final than Death is Yesterday. You can not bring it back, nor can you change it.
GEORGE REX The religious worry about life after death at the expense of life before death.
MOKOKOMA MOKHONOANA Not even piety will stay wrinkles, nor the encroachments of age, nor the advance of death, which ca...
UNKNOWN Any death is stupid from the viewpoint of whoever is undergoing it, Adam One used to say, because no...
MARGARET ATWOOD It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.
EPICTETUS One cannot justify death by taking another person's life. As death itself cannot be justified. No ma...
C. LIDE SANGTAM It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you...
PETER THIEL Religion is a theory about everything that needs to be proved only after death; those who prove or d...
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
THOMAS MANN Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself...
URSULA K. LE GUIN For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values ...
ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS Be of good cheer about death and know this as a truth-- that no evil can happen to a good man, eith...
SOCRATES Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.
KAMILA SHAMSIE O friends, be men, and let your hearts be strong, And let no warrior in the heat of fight Do w...
HOMER ("SMYRNS OF CHIOS") For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
GEORGE SANTAYANA How banal, yet irrefutable, is the assertion that [a person] is a mixture of the 'angelic' and the '...
MILOVAN DJILAS I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we...
ALBERT EINSTEIN There is only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory.. For without ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death ...
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE We need not fear death, for it is simply the next phase of life. We never die, we simply change form...
THE TRUTH Unless death is made a lesson for the living, the life lived is wasted.
Why should life come in...
JOSEPH LEWIS For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty t...
STANISLAV GROF The death of one will bring sorrow to my soul, but the death of 100? That will only make me think ab...
ALAN LE The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk ab...
DAVID CRYSTAL Feast of Commemoration of Helena, Protector of the Faith, 330 The cross is laid on every Christian...
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must ent...
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE I live nearby a graveyard, that's where I get all my inspiration for wisdom and life
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA The cycle of life is death, decomposition and regeneration, and a person who wants to stop killing a...
JOEL SALATIN The only real equality is in the cemetery
GERMAN PROVERB Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird meaning death
T.S. ELIOT The only difference between sex and death is, with death you can do it alone and nobody's going to m...
WOODY ALLEN Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not t...
J. R. R. TOLKIEN Who is mightier than death? Those who can smile when death threatens.
RUCKETT “A warrior thinks of death when things become unclear. The idea of death is the only thing that te...
CARLOS CASTANEDA Biological death is only a mechanical problem, it can be solved and man can live millions of years! ...
MEHMET MURAT ILDAN I want him to be put to death so that he can just be taken away from this world. I believe in the de...
ABRAHAM SCOTT One of the things that's particularly nefarious about Ebola is that it continues to live in a de...
DAVID QUAMMEN There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into...
JEANNETTE RANKIN It cannot be denied that outward accidents conduce much to fortune, favor, opportunity, death of oth...
FRANCIS BACON SR. Nuclear, ecological, chemical, economic — our arsenal of Death by Stupidity is impressive for a sp...
JEANETTE WINTERSON It only increases the mystery around the death of Arafat; there's no real conclusion.
AVI ISACHAROFF The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective...
JAMES PATTERSON It's a harrowing experience to see death approaching in haste towards you, what is hell but confront...
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not b...
J. R. R. TOLKIEN Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not b...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN Dreams, just dreams, it's all illusion
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA The world slides, the world goes, and death makes equal the rich and the poor
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA For a merely conscious being, death is the cessation of experiences, in much the same way that birth...
PETER SINGER The human spirit cannot be seen; neither can it be denied.
TONI SORENSON Death is something you cannot escape, such as death, or a cheesecake that has curdled, both of which...
LEMONY SNICKET I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles an...
GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevi...
SHERWIN B. NULAND Death in its natural state can be very beautiful. When you think about a body that's died of nat...
CAITLIN DOUGHTY Death is a part of all our lives. Whether we like it or not, it is bound to happen. Instead of avoid...
DALAI LAMA There is neither a Heaven nor a Hell. Life after Death is an oxymoron. Life is just another word for...
OLIVER MARKUS MALLOY There is nothing safe in religion, except in such a course of behaviour that leaves nothing for corr...
WILLIAM LAW Death is tough for the people left behind on earth.
PRATEEKSHA MALIK Death will be my only peace, many of us await it with a candle in the window.
CANDICE CAIN A person whom is dissatisfied with the existing constitution of the self might wish to eradicate the...
KILROY J. OLDSTER Fatigue dulls the pain, but awakes enticing thoughts of death. So! that is the way in which you are ...
DAG HAMMARSKJOLD

More Susan Sontag

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considere...
SUSAN SONTAG The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write...
SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precio...
SUSAN SONTAG It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the fin...
SUSAN SONTAG Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating th...
SUSAN SONTAG War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is,...
SUSAN SONTAG Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...
SUSAN SONTAG Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate...
SUSAN SONTAG American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chro...
SUSAN SONTAG The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of A...
SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own expe...
SUSAN SONTAG In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art ...
SUSAN SONTAG Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the ra...
SUSAN SONTAG Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading towa...
SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
SUSAN SONTAG The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
SUSAN SONTAG Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The questio...
SUSAN SONTAG A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

[Speech upon being awa...
SUSAN SONTAG Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
SUSAN SONTAG Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more ...
SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
SUSAN SONTAG Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. I...
SUSAN SONTAG Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e...
SUSAN SONTAG The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
SUSAN SONTAG The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less inter...
SUSAN SONTAG In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents ...
SUSAN SONTAG The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontroll...
SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
SUSAN SONTAG Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be ...
SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ...
SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
SUSAN SONTAG Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
SUSAN SONTAG In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o...
SUSAN SONTAG Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...
SUSAN SONTAG What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu...
SUSAN SONTAG Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative...
SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the...
SUSAN SONTAG Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men...
SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,...
SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
SUSAN SONTAG We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting...
SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,...
SUSAN SONTAG AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ...
SUSAN SONTAG AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder...
SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa...
SUSAN SONTAG Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us...
SUSAN SONTAG Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n...
SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ...
SUSAN SONTAG What we need is to use what we have.
SUSAN SONTAG Sanity is a cozy lie.
SUSAN SONTAG It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,...
SUSAN SONTAG The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and...
SUSAN SONTAG Taste has no system and no proofs.
SUSAN SONTAG The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture...
SUSAN SONTAG One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves....
SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o...
SUSAN SONTAG I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kind...
SUSAN SONTAG Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability....
SUSAN SONTAG 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 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