[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement -- not incitement.


Susan Sontag

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As time begins to pass, I have come to find that what I thought was, wasn't what I thought was so.
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I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and s...
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If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not...
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[About Susan Sontag] Her quest for meaning, for significance was endless. She described life more as...
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We can't go back to who we once were. We can only go on and become the person we were meant to be.
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We made a series of bad decisions, one after another after another ? and not getting food and water ...
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
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At forty two years, Sona Kilroy stood tall and strapping, a powerful figure. Rising to the rank of A...
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Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I wa...
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He was uniformly of an opinion which, though not a popular one, he was ready to aver, that the right...
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Anyways, that very same night there was a fight in the casino on B Deck. Some of the passengers got ...
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Some read to learn, some to laugh, and some to live.
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My world was changing, and I was not ready for it.
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Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.
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Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others
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The bulkheads were close together, the ceilings low above their helmets. Not much space in there to ...
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It shouldn't have mattered, not when Miel and the other girls in his class wore jeans more than they...
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It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wro...
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We had Cathy over from Oahu to read in 2004, and not only was the event well attended but her readin...
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She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a l...
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Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape -- I didn't read to learn, I was reading to read.
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i know im not the girl you wanted. not the one you want to hear from. but what you see is what you g...
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Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami...
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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read A...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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It was hard to be out of the game. I have a young daughter, so I was keeping busy. But not playing f...
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Not only was I ready to start the project. But, I'm ready to go out into the world and socialize aga...
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To enter the roadmap, there should be a full cessation of terror, hostilities and incitement,
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The environment I was raised in, you had to, to survive.
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I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyte...
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She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
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I'm looking forward to this. This will be another opportunity for women of all ages to come together...
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Let me put it this way: when I read, I learned the world was not as small as my house. And that ever...
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The real Liberace - and I'll preface this by saying that I didn't know the real one - was a ...
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She said, "Right now, while we have this time, I'm not going to do any of that other stuff. I'm goin...
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It's something we're watching, but not with great concern, ... I think there is room in the world fo...
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The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.
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I will not read the last page of novels first," I said, and then punched myself in the face.
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A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.
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O! green bottle come & take my frustrations away,so says the drunk.
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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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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.
SUSAN SONTAG
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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Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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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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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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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting...
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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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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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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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