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It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.


Susan Sontag

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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, ...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering f...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Life is weird and wonderful like that, is it not.
SONYA.E.WILLIAMS She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis ...
MILAN KUNDERA What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the sense...
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the s...
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE I say unto you that suffering is not holding you, you are holding suffering....
BHAGWAN SHREE RAJNEESH Buddhism teaches us not to try to run away from suffering. You have to confront suffering. You have ...
THICH NHAT HANH Pain is such an important thing in life. I think that as an artist you have to experience suffering.
NAOMI WATTS What is it that makes you so angry, bothers you so deeply, that you're compelled to act?
CRAIG GROESCHEL To endure the cross is not a tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegia...
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he esca...
BUDDHA By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not dimini...
RACHEL CARSON You can't be that or that or that... but you can try to behave as that...

So, what next!?...
DEYTH BANGER In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning ...
VIKTOR E. FRANKL Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
CAITLIN MORAN Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you to stop suffering
JANE ROBERTS After all, what is suffering but an awareness of suffering?
NANCY FARMER Suffering is an oxymoron. There is unfathomable peace and satisfaction in suffering for Christ. It i...
TED DEKKER Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes ...
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO The prime goal is to alleviate suffering, and not to prolong life. And if your treatment does not al...
CHRISTIAAN BARNARD For all mortals, birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering.
BUDDHA The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.
MELVIN JULES BUKIET The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resist...
JEAN NICOLAS GROU The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resist...
JEAN NICHOLAS GROU Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture o...
BARUCH SPINOZA It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.
ROBERT LYND It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering
ROBERT LYND I knew that suffering did not enoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It abs...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM What Fucks me... is that we both are the same... we all walk on the same path... but everything is a...
DEYTH BANGER That's SHIT!

How do you remove it?
You just put it inside the trash, easy as that.
DEYTH BANGER Life is suffering. Life is not resistance to suffering. The point of life is to suffer. This is why ...
RAINN WILSON The Serb population is suffering a repression that is much smaller but just as brutal and repugnant ...
LAMBERTO DINI As long as you think that the cause of your problem is “out there”—as long as you think that a...
BYRON KATIE Why is there inner burning [antar daah, inner suffering] present? Inner Burning [Antardaah] is not d...
DADA BHAGWAN It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
VICTOR HUGO The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but doe...
SAINT IGNATIUS It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.
ROBERT STAUGHTON LYND Suffering is not a consequence, it is about permission.
KAREN A. BAQUIRAN What is the noble truth of suffering? Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering and sorrow and lamenta...
BUDDHA Therapy is not to 'talk about' things, but to change the person's life, and to relieve s...
DAVID D. BURNS I cannot be a materialist -- but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to wh...
DAN MILLMAN Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to wh...
DAN MILLMAN The intensity of Intellectual suffering in Man is same as Emotional suffering in a Woman.
RAMANA PEMMARAJU All of us in society are supposed to believe that cruelty to animals is wrong and that it is a good ...
INGRID NEWKIRK It is what it is, it is what you make it.
JAMES DURBIN I found them both to be courageous, deeply wounded people. They're both still suffering from the inj...
OLIVER STONE No healthy Christian ever chooses suffering; he chooses God's will, as Jesus did, whether it means s...
OSWALD CHAMBERS I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it's c...
PETER SINGER Liberated from suffering and searchI have tied myself to the skirt of God.If I fly, I look at the su...
JALAL AD-DIN RUMI Suffering cheerfully endured ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy. The man...
MAHATMA GANDHI The moment we accept our pain is the moment we release our suffering. Suffering is created when we o...
ALARIC HUTCHINSON Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami...
CAITLIN MORAN Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society ma...
NAOMI WOLF Sometimes, truth causes pain and suffering. At such times, silence is preferred.
AMISH TRIPATHI Lack of space is the reason for most of the ailments that captive elephants are suffering from.
CAROL BUCKLEY The most challenging part of being a boss is that nobody will tell you if your work is suffering.
BILL WILLIAMS The cross is not the suffering tied to being natural existence, but the suffering tied to being Chri...
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER The striking thing about the Precious Blood is the bond it establishes between love and suffering in...
GABRIEL MARCEL We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The cross is the place where heaven meets earth and grace erupts. The cross is the place where Jesus...
MATT FARLOW The only advantage of knowledge is that it can justify suffering.
SORIN CERIN My meaning is, that any state of action or passion implies previous action or passion. It does not b...
PLATO The greatest miracle is to be alive. We can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our s...
THICH NHAT HANH The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it
MAIMONIDES Sex is unclean, not because of the pleasure, but because of the suffering it brings
THEODORE ROESZAK Suffering well borne is better than suffering removed.
UNKNOWN Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering...
JOHN DESMOND BERNAL Scholarship that is indifferent to human suffering is immoral.
RICHARD LEVINS One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, noth...
JANE AUSTEN Don’t throw away your suffering. Touch your suffering. Face it directly, and your joy will become ...
THICH NHAT HANH Every suffering is caused by a thought,what we need to do is stop thinking of that thought to elimin...
PATTY MEDINA You know that your happiness and suffering depend on the happiness and suffering of others. That ins...
THICH NHAT HANH If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ce...
SIMONE WEIL — This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.
— Who knows it better?
— Yet you believ...
ALAN PATON As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
ANNIE DILLARD And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. W...
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY There is some suffering that awaits us all.
MICHAEL LEUNIG Pain and evil confront us as a surd. Suffering, our own and that of others, is an experience through...
KALLISTOS WARE Fur is not luxury: it is an industry of death and suffering.
BRIGITTE BARDOT When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffer...
THICH NHAT HANH It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.
ERIC HOFFER It is not actual suffering but a taste of better things which excites people to revolt.
ERIC HOFFER The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?
WALTER KAUFMANN We're suffering from the same societal problems that most urban areas are.
DAVID BARNA Humor is a wonderful way to deal with our suffering because if we can laugh at our troubles, we can ...
GARRY SHANDLING When we direct our attention toward our suffering, we see our potential for happiness. We see the na...
THICH NHAT HANH There is nothing noble about suffering except the love and forgiveness with which we meet it. Many b...
STEPHEN LEVINE Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a l...
LANCE ARMSTRONG I am Happy and satisfied with what I am. 10000 will take me wrong, 1000 will go against me, 100 will...
NEHA KOTHARI If our mind was an ocean then every now and then we would have the perfect storm happening in it.Gar...
GARY F EVANS... Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.
BOB MARLEY Thirdly, even if we assume that the world is governed by purpose, we need only add that this purpose...
WALTER KAUFMANN

More Susan Sontag

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

[Speech upon being awa...
SUSAN SONTAG Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
SUSAN SONTAG Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more ...
SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
SUSAN SONTAG Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. I...
SUSAN SONTAG Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e...
SUSAN SONTAG The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
SUSAN SONTAG The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less inter...
SUSAN SONTAG In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents ...
SUSAN SONTAG The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontroll...
SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
SUSAN SONTAG Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be ...
SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ...
SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
SUSAN SONTAG Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
SUSAN SONTAG In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o...
SUSAN SONTAG Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...
SUSAN SONTAG What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu...
SUSAN SONTAG Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative...
SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the...
SUSAN SONTAG Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men...
SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,...
SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
SUSAN SONTAG We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting...
SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,...
SUSAN SONTAG AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ...
SUSAN SONTAG AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder...
SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa...
SUSAN SONTAG Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us...
SUSAN SONTAG Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n...
SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ...
SUSAN SONTAG What we need is to use what we have.
SUSAN SONTAG Sanity is a cozy lie.
SUSAN SONTAG 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