Susan Sontag Quotes

The only interesting ideas are heresies

~ Susan Sontag

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

~ Susan Sontag

Most of my reading is rereading.

~ Susan Sontag

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.

~ 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.

~ Susan Sontag

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

~ Susan Sontag

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

~ Susan Sontag

Alone, alone. I am alone – I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, I’m here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT.

~ Susan Sontag

I am scared, numbed from the marital wars - that deadly, deadening combat which is the opposite, the antithesis of the sharp painful struggles of lovers. Lovers fight with knives and whips, husbands and wives poisoned marshmallows, sleeping pills, and wet blankets.

~ Susan Sontag

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

~ Susan Sontag

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

~ Susan Sontag

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

~ Susan Sontag

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

~ Susan Sontag

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

~ Susan Sontag

Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the ... jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you.

~ Susan Sontag

With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.

~ Susan Sontag

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies, it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

~ Susan Sontag

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

We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the

~ 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.

~ Susan Sontag

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

~ Susan Sontag

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

~ Susan Sontag

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction....What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

~ Susan Sontag

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.

~ Susan Sontag

Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

~ Susan Sontag

It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices.

~ Susan Sontag

For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering.

~ Susan Sontag

There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

~ Susan Sontag

Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.

~ Susan Sontag

How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!

~ Susan Sontag

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w

~ Susan Sontag

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

~ Susan Sontag

If one could amputate part of one's consciousness...

~ Susan Sontag

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.

~ Susan Sontag

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

~ Susan Sontag

Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)

~ Susan Sontag

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

~ Susan Sontag

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

~ Susan Sontag

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

~ Susan Sontag

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

~ Susan Sontag