It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
... liberal intellectualstend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping thatthose in… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness - pushing us at intervals close to… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
“Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
