A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Family
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Awareness, AIDS
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.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Photography, Tourism, Travel
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Sex, Religion
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 and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: America
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.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Sex
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.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Health
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Injury
War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view “realistically;” that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent—war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: War
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Problems
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.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Morals, Morality
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
—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.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Proverbs, Proverbial Wisdom
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty—of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Capitalism
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.
—Susan Sontag
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 of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Taste, Style
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Authors & Writing
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Advice, Disease
Depression is melancholy minus its charms—the animation, the fits.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Depression
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Beauty, People
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one’s existence as a full human being and one’s existence as a sexual being—while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. Normally we don’t experience, at least don’t want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Pornography
All 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.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Politics
In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
—Susan Sontag
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Ambition
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Critics, Criticism
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Change
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Mental Illness, Attention
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects—making it possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: The Past
In the final analysis, “style” is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Style
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Muriel Rukeyser American Poet
- Sheryl Sandberg American Executive, Author
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
- Gertrude Stein American Writer
- Judy Blume American Author
- Emma Goldman American Anarchist
- Rita Mae Brown American Writer, Feminist
- George Steiner American Culture Critic
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