Susan Sontag quotes - page 4

Don't be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable. (Susan Sontag)
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. View quote
Susan Sontag
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. View quote
Susan Sontag
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. View quote
Susan Sontag
Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust. View quote
Susan Sontag
There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else. View quote
Susan Sontag
Americans have it right. Europeans are not in an evangelical - or a bellicose - mood. Indeed, sometimes I have to pinch myself to be sure I am not dreaming: that what many people in my own country now hold against Germany, which wreaked such horrors on the world for nearly a century - the new "German problem," as it were - is that Germans are repelled by war; that much of German public opinion is now virtually ... pacifist! View quote
Susan Sontag
The really important thing is not to reject anything. View quote
Susan Sontag
I like to feel dumb. That's how I know there's more in the world than me. View quote
Susan Sontag
It is passivity that dulls feeling. View quote
Susan Sontag
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive. (Susan Sontag)
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager. View quote
Susan Sontag
Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love. View quote
Susan Sontag
I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. View quote
Susan Sontag
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. View quote
Susan Sontag
Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once...and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you. View quote
Susan Sontag
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin. View quote
Susan Sontag
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable. View quote
Susan Sontag
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. View quote
Susan Sontag
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 use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. View quote
Susan Sontag
Today everything exists to end in a photograph. (Susan Sontag)
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art. View quote
Susan Sontag
10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction. View quote
Susan Sontag
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community. View quote
Susan Sontag
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting. View quote
Susan Sontag