Quote: Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Perversity is the muse of modern literature. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: 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]
Quote: The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: 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]
Quote: The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: 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]
Quote: The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. [Susan Sontag]
Quote: 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]