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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
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
Appears
Begins
Accepting
Understanding
World
More quotes by Susan Sontag
The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag
Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
Susan Sontag
I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
Susan Sontag
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Susan Sontag
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
Susan Sontag
Passion paralyzes good taste.
Susan Sontag
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
Susan Sontag
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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
Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
Susan Sontag
The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
Susan Sontag
To photograph is to confer importance.
Susan Sontag
Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
Susan Sontag
10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
Susan Sontag
I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
Susan Sontag
Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
Susan Sontag
Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
Susan Sontag
