Susan Sontag: Trending quotes

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Susan Sontag: 336 quotes33 likes

“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs are.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

“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 book In America

Source: In America

“Can I love someone… and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.”

Susan Sontag

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

“Most of my reading is rereading.”

Susan Sontag

Source: Conversations with Susan Sontag

“The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.”

Susan Sontag

“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

Source: Styles of Radical Will

“One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.”

Susan Sontag

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

“She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.”

Susan Sontag

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.”

Susan Sontag

“Desire has no history…”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

“We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?”

Susan Sontag

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)
Context: We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? It seems to me that one should always be seeking to talk oneself out of these stark oppositions.

“Elites presuppose masses.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

Styles of Radical Will

“Styles change, style doesn't.”

Susan Sontag

Styles, like everything else, change. Style doesn't. - Linda Ellerbee, Move On: Adventures in the Real World (1991), p. 35 G.P. Putnam's Sons ISBN 0399136231
Misattributed

“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

Susan Sontag

&quot;Notes on &#x27;Camp&#x27;&quot; (1964), note 9, p. 279 http://books.google.com/books?id=e3qgRrVlEH4C&amp;q=%22What+is+most+beautiful+in+virile+men+is+something+feminine+what+is+most+beautiful+in+feminine+women+is+something+masculine%22&amp;pg=PA279#v=onepage; originally published in Partisan Review, Vol. 31 No. 4 http://books.google.com/books?id=qEwqAQAAMAAJ&amp;q=%22What+is+most+beautiful+in+virile+men+is+something+feminine+what+is+most+beautiful+in+feminine+women+is+something+masculine%22&amp;pg=PA519#v=onepage, ( Fall 1964 http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/books/PR1964V31N4/HTML/#519/z) <br class="br">Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

“The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”

Susan Sontag

Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57

“It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”

Susan Sontag book AIDS and Its Metaphors

AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989), ch. 4, p. 125, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42013-7
AIDS and Its Metaphors was later published in combination with Illness As Metaphor. This combined edition is the one referenced here.

“Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.”

Susan Sontag

Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)