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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 3

All Quotes Age Aids Anxiety Art Awareness Beauty Cancer Change Character Comedy Communism Community Consciousness Country Criticism Culture Death Desire Destiny Detachment Dying Energy Evidence Exercise Failing Feelings Funny Giving Health Heart History Identity Illness Imagination Inspiration Inspirational Journey Joy Judgment Language Life Literature Love Lust Lying Memories Metaphor Morality Nature Pain Painting Passion Past Perfection Photography Pleasure Pollution Purpose Quality Reading Reality Revenge Risk Sexuality Silence Style Suffering Surrealism Today Tradition Tragedy Transformation Travel Understanding Values Violence Waiting War Writing

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Depression, Women, Lying

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

Trying, Slums

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.

Love, Couple, Hunting

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.190, Macmillan

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

People, Envy, Attention

1992 In Time Out,19 Aug.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding.

Mean, Thinking, Cynical

Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.

Art, Expression, Silence

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

Love dies because its birth was an error.

Divorce, Errors, Birth

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

New Year, Kindness, Prayer

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.365, Macmillan

How boring just to be a body.

Body, Boring

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Truth, Lying, Opposites

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.

Education, Book, Heart

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

Reality, Drawing, Cameras

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.8, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Feelings, Asks

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.27, Macmillan

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Inspirational, Photography, Today

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.25, Macmillan

It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.

Graduation, Funny Graduation, Hard

whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.

Scar

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

Cancer, Race, Government

"What's Happening in America" (1966)

Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness - pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

Love, Simple, Desire

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Photography, Inspire, Lust

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.156, Macmillan

What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.

Strong, Being In Love, Feels

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.356, Macmillan

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

Anger, Made, Shouting

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.58, Macmillan

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

Art, Real, Design

Evergreen Review Dec. 1964

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

Intelligent, People, Care

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.76, Macmillan

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Artist, Hands, Eras

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

Compassion, Needs, Action

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.101, Macmillan

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