Alas Quote by Susan Sontag

“Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.”

Susan Sontag

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.2 out of 5 (7 ratings)

More by Susan Sontag

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

Susan Sontag

Image

We are ruled by quotations.

Susan Sontag

Image

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or…

Susan Sontag

Image

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

Image

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

Image

“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 the time. During these years, kids would live communally – doing some work, anyway being physically active, in the countryside(...) This simple change in the age specificity of schooling would a) reduce adolescent discontent, anomie, boredom,…

Susan Sontag

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

Explore all 644 Susan Sontag quotes

More Alas quotes

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as…

William James

Alas, you don't need monsters for monstrous deeds to be accomplished.

Zygmunt Bauman

Image

Time, time - that is our greatest master! Alas, like Ugolino, time devours its own children.

Hector Berlioz

Image

Removing prejudices is, alas! too often removing the boundary of a delightful near prospect in order to let in a shockingly extensive one.

Sir Fulke Greville

Image

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would…

Francis Pharcellus Church

Alas, Postumus, the fleeting years slip by, nor will piety give any stay to wrinkles and pressing old age and untamable death.

Horace

Image

Sensible Catholics have for generations been ignoring the views on contraception held by reactionary old men in the Vatican, but alas, since it is…

A.C. Grayling

Image

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Miguel de Cervantes

Image

In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still…

Jane Welsh Carlyle

Image

The dumpling is indeed of more ancient institution, and of foreign origin; but alas, what were those dumplings? Nothing but a few lentils sodden…

John Arbuthnot

Image

“World is so beautiful, but alas! There are so many assholes.”

M.F. Moonzajer

Image

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will…

Rainer Maria Rilke

Browse all 429 Alas quotes

Alas Quote by Susan Sontag

Related quotes

More by Susan Sontag

More Alas quotes