Susan Sontag quotes - page 7

As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all to easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be "stimulated,” into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, "the man who unmasks his fictions” through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture "renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth.” There, he concludes, "no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.”. (Susan Sontag)
Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. That illness can be not an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more convincingly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation. View quote
Susan Sontag
If America is the culmination of Western white civilisation, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation. View quote
Susan Sontag
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph. View quote
Susan Sontag
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois. View quote
Susan Sontag
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. View quote
Susan Sontag
It is not the position, but the disposition. View quote
Susan Sontag
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing. View quote
Susan Sontag
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning. View quote
Susan Sontag
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. View quote
Susan Sontag
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. (Susan Sontag)
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation. View quote
Susan Sontag
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them. View quote
Susan Sontag
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste. View quote
Susan Sontag
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it. View quote
Susan Sontag
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them. View quote
Susan Sontag
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons. View quote
Susan Sontag
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. View quote
Susan Sontag
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone. (Susan Sontag)
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. View quote
Susan Sontag
The tide of undecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over and bitten into the facades of monuments and the surface of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion... the powerless saying: I'm here, too. View quote
Susan Sontag
Shall I tell you about getting older? When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don't fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty. So what's new? View quote
Susan Sontag
I'll take the American empire any day over the empire of what my pal Chris Hitchens calls "Islamic fascism." I'm not against fighting this enemy - it is an enemy and I'm not a pacifist. I think what happened on Sept. 11 was an appalling crime, and I'm astonished that I even have to say that, to reassure people that I feel that way. But I do feel that the Gulf War revisited is not the way to fight this enemy. View quote
Susan Sontag