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Susan Sontag: 336 quotes33 likes

“Wherever people feel safe (…) they will be indifferent.”

Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others

Source: Regarding the Pain of Others

“Art is seduction, not rape.”

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

“One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.”

Source: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”

Source: The Benefactor (1963), Ch. 1, p. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42012-9

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

Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others

Source: Regarding the Pain of Others

“Passion paralyzes good taste.”

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous”

“Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.”

“Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.”

Source: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“My ignorance is not charming.”

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.”

“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.”

“If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.”

“Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.”

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“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.”

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)
Context: 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. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.
Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

“What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship”

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”

Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others

Source: Regarding the Pain of Others

“All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.”

Source: At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches