Quote

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

Susan Sontag

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Born
Holds
Night
Kingdoms
Illness
Wells
Sick
Well
Health
Onerous
Life
Side
Dual
Sides
Citizenship
Everyone
Kingdom

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag
Image
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
Susan Sontag
Image
taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
Image
The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
Susan Sontag
Image
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
Susan Sontag
Image
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
Susan Sontag
Image
What we need is to use what we have.
Susan Sontag
Image
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
Susan Sontag
Image
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
Susan Sontag
Image
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
Susan Sontag
Image
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Susan Sontag
Image
Writing is a mysterious activity.
Susan Sontag
Image
One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
Susan Sontag
Image
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
Susan Sontag
Image
We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
Susan Sontag
Image
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
Image
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
Susan Sontag
Image
Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
Susan Sontag
Image
To photograph is to confer importance.
Susan Sontag
Image
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag