Susan Sontag quotes Born: 01/16/1933 Died: 12/28/2004 Country: usa

• Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. (Susan Sontag) [disease/treatment]
• In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. (Susan Sontag)
• With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses. (Susan Sontag) [disease/character/character/disease]
• Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. (Susan Sontag) [nature]
• Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. (Susan Sontag) [boredom/being/situation]
• Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits. (Susan Sontag) [depression/melancholy/minus]
• Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life -- its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness -- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. (Susan Sontag) [culture/result/loss/experience]
• Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated. (Susan Sontag) [literary style/literary style/love]
• 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. (Susan Sontag) [threat/fantasy/people]
• The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons. (Susan Sontag) [love]
• Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it. (Susan Sontag) [form/beauty/start/soul & body]
• Perversity is the muse of modern literature. (Susan Sontag) [literature]
• Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings. (Susan Sontag) [revenge/intellect/art/more]
• Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic. (Susan Sontag) [nature/america/civilization & progress/america]
• The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. (Susan Sontag) [painter]
• Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (Susan Sontag) [intelligence/taste/taste/]
• It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones. (Susan Sontag) [thing/bad]
• The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication. (Susan Sontag)
• In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. (Susan Sontag) [america/past]
• I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. (Susan Sontag) [envy/people/attention]
• 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. (Susan Sontag) [past/change/beauty]
• The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. (Susan Sontag) [possibilities]
• The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster. (Susan Sontag) [taste/master/fear]
• The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. (Susan Sontag) [truth/balance/truth]
• Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness. (Susan Sontag) [beauty/art/beauty/beauty]
• Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony. (Susan Sontag) [jews/culture/irony]
• In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation. (Susan Sontag) [analysis/literary style/art/art]
• Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. (Susan Sontag) [science/science/art]
• Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans -- the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum. (Susan Sontag) [furniture/human/human/paper]
• The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion. (Susan Sontag) [taste/bad/taste/high]
• Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. (Susan Sontag) [anxiety/vacation/take]

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