Susan Sontag quotes - page 10

With more people, there are more voices to tune out. (Susan Sontag)
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity. View quote
Susan Sontag
In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. View quote
Susan Sontag
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration . . . because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood. View quote
Susan Sontag
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. View quote
Susan Sontag
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. View quote
Susan Sontag
The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place. View quote
Susan Sontag
American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism. View quote
Susan Sontag
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. View quote
Susan Sontag
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. View quote
Susan Sontag
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals. (Susan Sontag)
Taste has no system and no proofs. View quote
Susan Sontag
Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies. View quote
Susan Sontag
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster. View quote
Susan Sontag
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses. View quote
Susan Sontag
It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making. View quote
Susan Sontag
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic. View quote
Susan Sontag
It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. View quote
Susan Sontag
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness. View quote
Susan Sontag
One set of messages of the society we live in is Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. View quote
Susan Sontag
Detachment is the prerogative of an elite and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture. (Susan Sontag)
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life -- its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness -- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. View quote
Susan Sontag
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 have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work they can take pictures. View quote
Susan Sontag
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope. . . View quote
Susan Sontag
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . The anthropologist submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual. View quote
Susan Sontag