In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag
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She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT to the victor go the spoils
THE AMERICA Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY I haven't collected memorabilia. I am not a person who lives in the past.
YVONNE CRAIG I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES I wanted everything from and everything for him, because I wanted every piece of him.
KIERA CASS To get over the past, you first have to accept that the past is over. No matter how many times you r...
MANDY HALE I had a best friend once 20 years down the line a friendship that you just do not get now, i regarde...
GARY F EVANS... When you live in the present, the past is forgotten & the future takes care of itself.
MANDY HALE All the things that are in the past are in the past.
PABLO SANDOVAL There's no sustenance in the past.
VIOLETTE LEDUC The things i know now, i never knew then. I wish i knew.
SOTONYE ANGA To have the time to reminisce is one of the futures gifts. Don't think to much, don't live to fast, ...
CALVIN WILSON We are the masters of our own destinies we shape and mould our lives into to the circumstances surro...
GARY F EVANS... Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG When you grow up there are things that you would love to do make your father proud is one and have f...
GARY F EVANS... 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 It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.
SUSAN SONTAG With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - li...
SUSAN SONTAG What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-re...
SUSAN SONTAG No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
SUSAN SONTAG I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and b...
LYDIA MILLET We fall back into the past, we jump ahead into the future, and in this we lose our entire lives.
THICH NHAT HANH Don't tug your ear with anyone else. That's mine.
KIERA CASS Remembering something from the past? you are creating it right now as evidence for who you are now.
FREDERICK DODSON The one thing we know today is we can't continue to do business the way we have in the past.
BUD SELIG Reinvent yourself. Don't let your past weigh you down.
MARTY RUBIN It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is...
MARCEL PROUST You can't judge the present by the past. Each day is different, and you live it differently.
MARTY RUBIN Honesty,moral standards ,and principles all partner up with truth be the best you can be. In this wo...
GARY F EVANS... A ship does not sail with yesterday's wind.
LOUIS L'AMOUR No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves...
HARUKI MURAKAMI C'mon, I mean who didn't listen to 'The Who' in the 60s?
PATTI SMITH The present is an eternal attempt to separate the past from the future.
MOKOKOMA MOKHONOANA She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT When I die it will be game over,... but I know one life is short, to be selfish is not the best deci...
DEYTH BANGER For some, excavating the past isn’t an adventure, it’s more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an op...
RAQUEL CEPEDA Time that is spent dwelling on the past will surely continue in your present moment - and the future...
MICHELLE CRUZ-ROSADO *Throwing bread out of door* AND STAY OUT!
RUSSELL T. DAVIES I'd sooner make fresh mistakes today than correct the errors of the past.
MARTY RUBIN She was intimidating and all I could do was sit back on the couch as she paced back and forth, slowl...
IN THE MAKING Just because you believe something was true in the past does not mean it will be true in the future.
JEFFREY FRY Without God there could be no American form of government nor an American way of life. Recognition o...
DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER These young ones. They do not understand. There are so few of us left who remember how destructive r...
CONNILYN COSSETTE America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the fu...
FREDERICK DOUGLAS The battle is not physical, it is spiritual and your mind is the battleground. Keep your mind pure a...
JEANETTE CORON I can't re-examine work I did in the past with pride.
DANIEL DAY-LEWIS What happened in the past is just that, the past. Champion or not.
STEVE NASH As a kid, I wasn't listening to The Who; I was listening to Frankie Knuckles.
NICK FROST Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over.
RICHARD CARLSON I hope you find someone you can't live without.I really do. And I hope you never have to know what i...
KIERA CASS The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a myste...
KATE CHOPIN The road to healing is a rocky one, and you need to know that. There are times when every fibre in y...
CORALLIE BUCHANAN dont let the old break you; let the love make you
BERTRAND RUSSELL Long after the poor departed have gone from our hearts, their insignificant dust continues to be min...
MARCEL PROUST Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying...
TONI MORRISON My name will be Edith Proir," she says. "And there is much I am happy to forget.
VERONICA ROTH We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.
SOPHOCLES If the best is possible, than good is never enough and only do the best.
ROBERT SIAHAAN The Doctor: This is bad, I don't like this. [kicks console and yells in pain] Never use force, you j...
STEVEN MOFFAT The idea is to believe me... but as far as I see the world... to believe is a sin... to trust me one...
DEYTH BANGER Savor the moment. Set a goal that you value and plan the steps to of getting there in a way that you...
TERENCE T. GORSKI ...I want it to be as easy as breathing for you to say yes.
KIERA CASS For as much as you can, build the past and the future that you can carry yourself.
MARIANA FULGER Don't sacrifice the present and attempt to achieve the impossible- to completely correct the past......
ASSEGID HABTEWOLD In the beginning, there was nothing and from nothing came our species then behold the dawn of music....
GARY F EVANS... In the past, art was admired and revered from afar. Today, there is more of an interactive relations...
ISSEY MIYAKE To have the guts to say what needs to be said means that people care enough to say it. It is when pe...
GARY F EVANS... Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
CAITLIN MORAN Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.
T.S. ELIOT There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and tr...
BONES THE DOCTOR IN THE PHOTO Today is about the now, the moment you live in, so do now what you want to do
SOTONYE ANGA God is not impressed with what PRECEDES your name, but how you PROCEED in His Name."
BJ NELSON When Luke had descended into the River Styx, he would've had to focus on something important that wo...
RICK RIORDAN The real world out there isn't nearly as nice as some people prefer it to be, so don't swallow every...
DAVID EDDINGS I do intend on giving you things, but that's not what I mean. I'm going to love you more that any ma...
KIERA CASS Now... Just run.' [said the Doctor.]
One of the things you learn very quickly around the Doctor...
JAMES GOSS I'll be a story in your head. That's okay. We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh...
STEVEN MOFFAT The Doctor: [aiming gun at the ceiling] Didn't anyone ever tell you? There's one thing you never put...
STEVEN MOFFAT It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezes are cool.
STEVEN MOFFAT Angel Bob: Doctor? Excuse me, hello, Doctor? Angel Bob here, sir.
The Doctor: Ah, there you ar...
STEVEN MOFFAT There's something that doesn't make sense. Let's go and poke it with a stick.
STEVEN MOFFAT Geronimo!
STEVEN MOFFAT You don't want to take over the universe. You wouldn't know what to do with it beyond shout at it.
STEVEN MOFFAT It's Smith, actually.' Dr Smith smiled, bowing. 'I've remembered that my name is Smith. Almost defin...
JAMES GOSS [But] I have come across anything so painfully beautiful as that kiss. I wish it was something I cou...
KIERA CASS An emotionally locked person refuses to let go of their sad memories and live in the now.
KILROY J. OLDSTER I have had shoulder injuries in the past, but usually it's from training.
WARREN CUCCURULLO I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.
DAN QUAYLE I mean, I've been stupid in the past, and I've learned from that.
AIDAN QUINN That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.
MURRAY WALKER He obliterates things, she realized. He shatters them. They think they've won because he's a ...
NICK HARKAWAY To search the sands of a lost desert for truth and justice in this world today you might as well be ...
GARY F EVANS... Rose: 'If you are an alien, how come you sound like you're from the north?'
Doctor: 'Lots of pl...
RUSSELL T. DAVIES I smiled to myself, thinking of America, measuring her against the other girls. She was pretty, if a...
KIERA CASS
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 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