"Sanity is a cozy lie."
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Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 1 of 27)
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"A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it."
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"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste."
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"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
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"What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."
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"We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters."
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"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list."
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"It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel."
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"Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager."
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"In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."
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"For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied."
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"Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares."
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"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."
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"A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter."
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"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."
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"It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall."
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"Life is a movie; death is a photograph."
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"The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood."
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"Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses."
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"...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude."
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