"Sanity is a cozy lie."
"Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies."
6 likes
Source: Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Susan Sontag
"A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it."
"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste."
"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
"What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."
"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."