Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.”

— Susan Sontag

352. “How can I go on this way? And how can I not?”

— Susan Sontag

353. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Susan Sontag

355. “To be sure, nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.”

— Susan Sontag

356. “To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.”

— Susan Sontag

357. “Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

359. “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

361. “We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.”

— Susan Sontag

362. “There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

364. “The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.”

— Susan Sontag

365. “The really important thing is not to reject anything.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

368. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

371. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

375. “Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn.”

— Susan Sontag

376. “Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

— Susan Sontag

377. “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

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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

384. “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

385. “Elites presuppose masses.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

393. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

395. “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

396. “Courage is morally neutral.”

— Susan Sontag

397. “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman.” To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag