Susan Sontag Quotes

349 quotes in 3689 categories

• It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
• Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
• Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing…
• One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic…
• It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
• Taste has no system and no proofs.
• The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself…
• The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent…
• Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology...
• Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that…
• Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or…
• Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.
• In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.
• I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets.
• Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at…
• Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They…
• It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it…
• The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more…
• Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to…
• In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us…

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