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
Disturb
Ideas
Life

More quotes by 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
Image
Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
Susan Sontag
Image
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
Susan Sontag
Image
What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
Susan Sontag
Image
An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
Susan Sontag
Image
The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
Susan Sontag
Image
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
Susan Sontag
Image
Courage is morally neutral.
Susan Sontag
Image
I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
Susan Sontag
Image
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
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
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
Image
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
Susan Sontag
Image
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
Susan Sontag
Image
Taste has no system and no proofs.
Susan Sontag
Image
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
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
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 really important thing is not to reject anything.
Susan Sontag
Image
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag