Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.


Susan Sontag

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A book worth reading is worth buying.
JOHN RUSKIN
If a book is worth reading, it will most probably be worth reading twice.
AMAN JASSAL
If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
JOHN RUSKIN
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – wo...
C.S. LEWIS
if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.
PAULO COELHO
I was always taught that book keeping was more relevant than book reading. The only thing worth read...
ASHWIN SANGHI
Papa thought that any book worth reading twice was worth owning. So instead of buying desserts, we b...
NATALIE S. BOBER
Every book is worth reading. If it cannot make you wiser it will make you a critic
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA
If you would not be forgotton as soon as you are dead and rotten, Either write something worth readi...
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, --something more than we...
CYRIL CONNOLLY
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we...
CYRIL CONNOLLY
A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.
DAVID MITCHELL
It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.
C.S. LEWIS
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do th...
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of educat...
ALEISTER CROWLEY
Books worth reading once are worth reading twice; and what is most important of all, the masterpiece...
JOHN MORLEY
Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writin...
BILL CALLAHAN
The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom...
H. L. MENCKEN
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth readi...
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’r...
MINDY KALING
Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my reader...
R. A. SALVATORE
I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
UMBERTO ECO
You learn more about life from watching 'Big Brother' than from reading a book.
JOHN DE MOL, JR.
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are wo...
H. L. MENCKEN
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are wo...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN
If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated reading deserves to be read at all.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.
LORD (GEORGE GORDON) BYRON
Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and p...
PAUL THEROUX
I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out a...
L.M. MONTGOMERY
If a book doesn’t inspire you to read more, it was not worth read.
AMAN JASSAL
Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done s...
JOHN MORLEY
Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done s...
MOLIERE
If we finished our work, the teacher would say, 'Now don't read ahead.' But sometimes I hid the book...
BEVERLY CLEARY
Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth re...
GEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYAN
Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth readin...
G. M. TREVELYAN
Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth rea...
G. M. TREVELYAN
Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth read...
GEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYAN
Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth readin...
GEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYAN
Just the child seeing a parent with a book or a newspaper, or reading a recipe or a book on how to r...
GINGER WILLIFORD
No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.
ORSON SCOTT CARD
This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Po...
TERRY PRATCHETT
I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anac...
GARTH STEIN
When you read something, and especially when you're reading compellingly great, that becomes par...
DAVID FERRY
The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of th...
ANATOLE BROYARD
I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading’ is a contradiction in terms; reading should not b...
JORGE LUIS BORGES
What makes a good book? Simply put, a good book is one that you enjoy reading.
CARMELA DUTRA
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
OSCAR WILDE
I like to think I’ve written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters.
CARLA H. KRUEGER
A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "H...
ITALO CALVINO
Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters -- because girls can read as well as boys -- r...
MERVYN GRIFFITH-JONES
I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was signific...
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The most comfortable place for a tired mind is in the lap of a book.
AMAN JASSAL
Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.
TERRY PRATCHETT
You cannot get PTSD from reading a book or from hearing a story, even repeated stories over and over...
DALE ARCHER
~Reading a book is like looking through a window!
ZETTA HUPF
I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
HEINRICH HEINE
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book a...
DODIE SMITH
It is usual to speak in a playfully apologetic tone about one’s adult enjoyment of what are called...
C.S. LEWIS
One good quote is worth a book
RUDYARD KIPLING
One good quote is worth a book
JOSEPH ROUX
Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book...
YANN MARTEL
A good book ought to bring out lots of different responses from those that read it - none of them pr...
SHARON DRAPER
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgo...
ALBERTO MANGUEL
We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've...
ALI SMITH
If you enjoy reading something, read it.
S. E. HINTON
For my 2015 Book Reading Challenge resolution, the 1 (one) book I want to read is titled: "Write, yo...
ROLF AND RANGER
Reading a book is a silent conversation between two friends.
AMAN JASSAL
I struggle with reading a bit. I'm slightly dyslexic, so reading takes me quite a while, and in ...
THOMAS BRODIE-SANGSTER
I couldn't believe they were going to let us read something like that. At first, I didn't want to re...
CANDICE WILLIAMS
To read a book, to think it over, and to write out notes is a useful exercise; a book which will not...
MARIA MITCHELL
If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, tho...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
So many people mistakenly take the Bible as a mere reading book! They read it every now and then! We...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.
ERASMUS
Happiness is not always reading the same page in the same book. Sometimes it is just wanting to hold...
FAYE HALL
When people are reading a book, it's a personal thing. They're reading it; it's in their...
KRISTY SWANSON
For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one - reading a book, learning a music...
SONU NIGAM
I read everyday, because reading takes me away, away to a place where nothing is impossible.
MANOJ ARORA
Spending waiting moments doing crossword puzzles or reading a book you brought yourself.
MARILYN VOS SAVANT
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your...
ANGELA CARTER
The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story,...
CARLTON CUSE
Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What the...
LEVAR BURTON
When you read a book, you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're re...
NINA JACOBSON
What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading
ALICE JAMES
You're never alone when you're reading a book.
SUSAN WIGGS
A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading.
KATHRYN HARRISON
So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; m...
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
A book is indeed dead until a reader brings it into life by reading it.
AMAN JASSAL
I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read - which is to ...
AMY TAN
In my defense, I love the book in a postmodern kind of way where I've always sensed that it contains...
CAROLINE KEPNES
Something significant, magical, and
inspiring happens with each word you read in the pages of ...
MARTHA SWEENEY
..reading a book doesn’t mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying part...
NOAM CHOMSKY
We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expan...
JUDITH BUTLER
The way a book is read which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to ...
NORMAN COUSINS
The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replie...
ANDRé MAUROIS
When you read a supernatural suspense story or a ghost story, or a horror story, the evil at play is...
MICHAEL KORYTA
Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth rea...
G. M. TREVELYAN
I don't read anything anymore. I don't have the eyesight. I read my own copy, that's all. I think I'...
JOHN GOULD
Read everything! Don't just read things that are in your comfort zone or things that you think y...
CASSANDRA CLARE
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.
MOSES HADAS

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American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chro...
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The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own expe...
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In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art ...
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the ra...
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading towa...
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What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
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The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The questio...
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

[Speech upon being awa...
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more ...
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It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. I...
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e...
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The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
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The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less inter...
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents ...
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The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontroll...
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
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Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be ...
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ...
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Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
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Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
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Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
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Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
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A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o...
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu...
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative...
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I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
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Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
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Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the...
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Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men...
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Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,...
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting...
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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
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Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,...
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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ...
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AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder...
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I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa...
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
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Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us...
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n...
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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ...
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What we need is to use what we have.
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
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In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,...
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The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and...
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture...
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves....
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What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o...
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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kind...
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Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
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The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability....
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people t...
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of...
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists...
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine w...
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less intere...
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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the s...
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For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ...
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The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured m...
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wis...
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past...
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, th...
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My library is an archive of longings.
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We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the cal...
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The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper...
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We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if n...
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...
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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...
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Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on va...
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an ind...
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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.
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Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational term...
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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...
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
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A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remai...
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I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a pass...
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Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exagge...
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'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love o...
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It is not the position, but the disposition.
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The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions
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Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by...
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Pre...
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Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
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Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l...
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Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
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All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memor...
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion o...
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American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed ...
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or t...
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Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citiz...
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [...
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People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens...
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So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympath...
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All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If ...
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To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which doe...
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Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs ar...
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Desire has no history...
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Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism...
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Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--on...
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Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics...
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Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri...
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How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel...
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Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ...
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c...
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[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.
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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
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Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo...
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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extensi...
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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All photographs are memento mori.
SUSAN SONTAG
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
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The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper...
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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual dis...
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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