"Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same."
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Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 17 of 27)
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is."
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"With more people, there are more voices to tune out."
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"Ideas disturb the levelness of life"
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"Few ever see what is not already inside their heads."
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"The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences."
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"A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing."
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"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."
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"My skull is crammed with quotations."
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"Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina."
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"the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life."
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"The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched."
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"That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity."
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"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have."
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"Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test."
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"Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself."
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"...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it."
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"God, living is enormous!"
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"His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him."
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"The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo."
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