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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.


Susan Sontag

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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES It takes just a few thoughts of the people to know who they are actually, but only to a person who i...
ANUJ SOMANY The power to become the character you desire to be in life is by learning how to condition your thin...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) Today is about the now, the moment you live in, so do now what you want to do
SOTONYE ANGA The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers a...
ARUNDHATI ROY Don't write about Man; write about a man.
E.B. WHITE All day long you sit and sew,
Stitch life down for fear it grow,

Stitch life down fo...
EDITH SITWELL There was always one. Every village seemed to have one young woman who believed her beauty could som...
KERRELYN SPARKS We have tears in our eyes
As we wave our goodbyes,
We so loved being with you, we three. ROALD DAHL Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over.
RICHARD CARLSON Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it?...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY I tried to tell you. You said you didn't care, remember?"
A muscle ticked below his eye. "You s...
GENA SHOWALTER It's not about what it is, it's about what it can become.
DR. SEUSS And so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually.
JIMI HENDRIX Affect the main character or characters and you win the game.
DEYTH BANGER Remembering something from the past? you are creating it right now as evidence for who you are now.
FREDERICK DODSON Life's irony;The mediocre minds are ever ready to confront a great idea in a very great way.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) Friendship is a double-edged sword one side it can be great and true but the other side it spells be...
GARY F EVANS... For my generation, the bomber jacket is like a replacement for the suit jacket. It's a piece tha...
THE WEEKND I'm the most boring person to talk to.
THE WEEKND Fish die when they are out of water, and people die without law and order.
THE TALMUD He who promises runs in debt.
THE TALMUD For me, bomber jackets are smart, but they are also street and have a lot of attitude.
THE WEEKND Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not ...
THE BIBLE Who is a wise man? He who learns of all men.
THE TALMUD Who is wise? One who learns from all.
THE TALMUD The end result of wisdom is... good deeds.
THE TALMUD Starting a band is the easy part. Once you've formed the band, you have to tell a story, and tha...
THE EDGE Join the company of lions rather than assume the lead among foxes.
THE TALMUD No labor, however humble, is dishonoring.
THE TALMUD If one man says to thee, Thou art a donkey, pay no heed. If two speak thus, purchase a saddle.
THE TALMUD Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, grow, grow.
THE TALMUD This is the punishment of a liar: he is not believed, even when he speaks the truth.
THE TALMUD Prayer carries us half way to God, fasting brings us to the door of His palace, and alms-giving proc...
THE KORAN When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.
THE TALMUD This is the sum of all -- righteousness. In causing pleasure or in giving pain, in doing good or inj...
THE MAHABHARTA The sun will set without thy assistance.
THE TALMUD A person will be called to account on Judgment Day for every permissible thing he might have enjoyed...
THE TALMUD Thy friend has a friend, and thy friend's friend has a friend; be discreet.
THE TALMUD Everyone whose deeds are more than his wisdom, his wisdom endures; and everyone whose wisdom is more...
THE TALMUD Loving kindness is greater than laws; and the charities of life are more than all ceremonies.
THE TALMUD The deeper the sorrow the less the tongue has it.
THE TALMUD A quotation at the right moment is like bread to the famished.
THE TALMUD To break an oral agreement which is not legally binding is morally wrong
THE TALMUD Man has three friends on whose company he relies. First, wealth - which goes with him only while goo...
THE TALMUD Join the company of lions rather than assume the lead among foxes.
THE TALMUD The doctrines of religion are resolved into carefulness; carefulness into vigorousness; vigorousnes...
THE TALMUD Greater even than the pious man is he who eats that which is the fruit of his own toil; for scriptur...
THE TALMUD Sin is sweet in the beginning, but bitter in the end.
THE TALMUD A wrathful man stirreth up strife: but he that is slow to anger appeaseth strife.
THE BIBLE Know Ye not ... that the spirit of God dwelleth within you?
THE BIBLE If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before [it hated] you.
THE BIBLE Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ru...
THE BIBLE Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment; and a babbler is no better. The words of a wise ma...
THE BIBLE A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.
THE BIBLE Strength and honor are her clothing: and she shall rejoice in time to come.
THE BIBLE And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom...
THE BIBLE And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us while he talked with us by the way, a...
THE BIBLE But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are ...
THE BIBLE Reprove not a scorner, lest he hate thee: rebuke a wise man, and he will love thee.
THE BIBLE A wise man is strong; yea, a man of knowledge increaseth strength.
THE BIBLE Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!
THE BIBLE Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. For the merchandise of...
THE BIBLE When wisdom entereth into thine heart, and knowledge is pleasant unto thy soul; Discretion shall pre...
THE BIBLE For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their...
THE BIBLE The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that ruleth among fools. Wisdom is...
THE BIBLE So that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply thine heart to understanding; Yea, if thou cri...
THE BIBLE Wisdom is the principle thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.
THE BIBLE Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good.
THE BIBLE A wise man's heart is at his right hand; but a fool's heart at his left.
THE BIBLE There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged...
THE BIBLE And when he was entered into a ship, his disciples followed him. And, behold, there arose a great te...
THE BIBLE Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see t...
THE BIBLE He who works his land will have abundant food.
THE BIBLE God helps those who persevere.
THE KORAN Live well. It is the greatest revenge.
THE TALMUD And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords...
THE BIBLE The highest form of wisdom is kindness
THE TALMUD The burden is equal to the horse's strength.
THE TALMUD Be eager to fulfill the smallest duty and flee from transgression for one duty includes another and ...
THE TALMUD Beware of too much laughter, for it deadens the mind and produces oblivion.
THE TALMUD Sheep follow sheep.
THE TALMUD Live well. It is the greatest revenge.
THE TALMUD When you're traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonica...
THE WEEKND This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make u...
THE MENTOR For an Ethiopian mother, if you have a chubby kid, it means you're doing something good.
THE WEEKND The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in 'The Dark Knight' had the scar across his mouth,...
THE WEEKND 'Trilogy' was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn't le...
THE WEEKND The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It...
THE EDGE It wasn’t that everything was going my way, but I began to believe that the way it was going was p...
THE HIPPIE Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.
THE SCRIPT It was strange that in some sort of Jeffrey Dahmer meets Ghandi way I was
able to love myself f...
THE HIPPIE I don't think I'd ever apologise for music I make, no.
THE WEEKND My closet is like Bart Simpson's.
THE WEEKND I knew the second I finished the first record - 'House Of Balloons' - and had all this mater...
THE WEEKND Prince turned experimental music into pop music. 'When Doves Cry,' the whole 'Purple Rai...
THE WEEKND 'House of Balloons' was special because I had no deadlines, and nobody knew me, so there wer...
THE WEEKND Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.
THE TALMUD Policeman says, "Son you can't stay here"
I said, "There's someone I'm waiting for if it's a da...
THE SCRIPT

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 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