Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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. Although we all prefer to use 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

352. “AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.”

— Susan Sontag

353. “Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.”

— Susan Sontag

354. “Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.”

— Susan Sontag

355. “Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.”

— Susan Sontag

356. “A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.”

— Susan Sontag

357. “Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.”

— Susan Sontag

358. “One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.”

— Susan Sontag

359. “Experiences aren’t pornographic; only images and representations – structures of the imagination – are.”

— Susan Sontag

360. “There are some elements in life – above all, sexual pleasure – about which it isn’t necessary to have a position.”

— Susan Sontag

361. “Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.”

— Susan Sontag

362. “Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.”

— Susan Sontag

363. “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.”

— Susan Sontag

364. “If one could amputate part of one’s consciousness...”

— Susan Sontag

365. “Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism.”

— Susan Sontag

366. “A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.”

— Susan Sontag

367. “Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.”

— Susan Sontag

368. “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

369. “Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.”

— Susan Sontag

370. “The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.”

— Susan Sontag

371. “The early Romantic sought superiority by desiring, and by desiring to desire, more intensely than others do.”

— Susan Sontag

372. “My repressed feelings leak out – slowly – in the form of resentment – a continual leakage of resentment.”

— Susan Sontag

373. “Courage is morally neutral.”

— Susan Sontag

374. “He looked into the hole, and like any hole it said, Jump.”

— Susan Sontag

375. “Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.”

— Susan Sontag

376. “The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

378. “The “happening” operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.”

— Susan Sontag

379. “It’s beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.”

— Susan Sontag

380. “A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.”

— Susan Sontag

381. “Elites presuppose masses.”

— Susan Sontag

382. “In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding – at a distance, through the medium of photography – other people’s pain.”

— Susan Sontag

383. “People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.”

— Susan Sontag

384. “It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.”

— Susan Sontag

385. “Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.”

— Susan Sontag

386. “The only ideals allowed are healthy ones – those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.”

— Susan Sontag

387. “The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction – as if one were obliged to choose between them...”

— Susan Sontag

388. “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

389. “The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.”

— Susan Sontag

390. “Beware of anything that you hear yourself saying often.”

— Susan Sontag

391. “Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to “care” more.”

— Susan Sontag

392. “I have always been full of lust – as I am now – but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.”

— Susan Sontag

393. “You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.”

— Susan Sontag

394. “Why wouldn’t you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It’s far more interesting to write about others.”

— Susan Sontag

395. “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”

— Susan Sontag

396. “Writing is a mysterious activity.”

— Susan Sontag

397. “I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.”

— Susan Sontag

398. “What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such – of what lies beyond the human and the made – and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.”

— Susan Sontag

399. “Being self-conscious. Treating one’s self as an other. Supervising oneself.”

— Susan Sontag

400. “Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists.”

— Susan Sontag