"Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them."
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 13 of 27)
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated."
Read quote
6 likes
"Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois."
Read quote
6 likes
"Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility."
Read quote
6 likes
"So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful."
Read quote
6 likes
"Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers."
Read quote
5 likes
"A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words."
Read quote
5 likes
"I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies."
Read quote
5 likes
"I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams."
Read quote
5 likes
"Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease."
Read quote
5 likes
"Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics."
Read quote
5 likes
"But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures"
Read quote
5 likes
"Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds."
Read quote
5 likes
"What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work."
Read quote
5 likes
"The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community."
Read quote
5 likes
"Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through."
Read quote
5 likes
"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."
Read quote
5 likes
"Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech."
Read quote
5 likes
"I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive."
Read quote
5 likes
"Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody."
Read quote
5 likes