Susan Sontag: Trending quotes (page 4)

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”

“The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.”

“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art”

“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.”

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”

“I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.”

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality… One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”

“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”

“I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.”

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”

“Life is a movie; death is a photograph.”

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.”

“Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.”

“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”

“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.”

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

“Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.”

“Rules of taste enforce structures of power.”