Quote

Ideas disturb the levelness of life

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
Ideas
Life
Disturb

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
Susan Sontag
Image
Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
Susan Sontag
Image
Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
Susan Sontag
Image
writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
Susan Sontag
Image
One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
Image
the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
Susan Sontag
Image
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Susan Sontag
Image
The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
Susan Sontag
Image
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
Susan Sontag
Image
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Susan Sontag
Image
What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
Susan Sontag
Image
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
Susan Sontag
Image
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
Image
I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.
Susan Sontag
Image
In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
Susan Sontag
Image
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Susan Sontag
Image
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
Image
Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
Susan Sontag
Image
I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
Susan Sontag
Image
In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
Susan Sontag