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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
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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
Fact
Facts
Negotiations
Must
Negotiation
Life
Series
Choose
Told
Choices
Understanding
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.
Susan Sontag
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
Susan Sontag
It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
Susan Sontag
Desire has no history.
Susan Sontag
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
Susan Sontag
There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Susan Sontag
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
Susan Sontag
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
Susan Sontag
The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
Susan Sontag
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
Susan Sontag
Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
Susan Sontag
I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo-Conservatives.
Susan Sontag
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
Susan Sontag
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Susan Sontag
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
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Susan Sontag
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Susan Sontag
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
Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
Susan Sontag
