Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “How can I go on this way? And how can I not?”

— Susan Sontag

352. “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

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. “Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

358. “My loyalty to the past – my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most.”

— Susan Sontag

359. “The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

363. “What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

365. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

369. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

374. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

377. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

380. “Courage is morally neutral.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— 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. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

394. “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

395. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Susan Sontag

397. “In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.”

— Susan Sontag

398. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag