Quotes - Nancy (Novato, CA) Showing 1-30 of 63

#1

“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

tags: attention, eagerness

#2

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

tags: action, attention, concentration, connection, eagerness, inspiration, intelligence, observation, vitality

2099 likes

#3

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
― Susan Sontag

1029 likes

#4

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

tags: depression, melancholy

544 likes

#5

“I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.”
― Susan Sontag

3092 likes

#6

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”
― Susan Sontag

tags: sanity

316 likes

#7

“The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.”
― Susan Sontag

330 likes

#8

“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.”
― Susan Sontag

332 likes

#9

“Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

317 likes

#10

“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]”
― Susan Sontag

tags: attention, observation, perspicacity, writers, writing

280 likes

#11

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

275 likes

#12

“10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”
― Susan Sontag

tags: cruelty, humanity, mankind, mercy

287 likes

#13

“My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

246 likes

#14

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
― Susan Sontag

454 likes

#15

“Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”
― Susan Sontag

tags: history, jewish, mozart, race, racism, shakespeare

153 likes

#16

“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.”
― Susan Sontag

tags: susan-sontag

194 likes

#17

“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

tags: illness, metaphor

262 likes

#18

“Life is a movie; death is a photograph.”
― Susan Sontag

150 likes

#19

“It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

tags: heartbreak, love, love-hurts

352 likes

#20

“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.”
― Susan Sontag

tags: writing

90 likes

#21

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.”
― Susan Sontag

tags: humans, intelligence, people

130 likes

#22

“I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.”
― Susan Sontag

176 likes

#23

“I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

tags: lust

83 likes

#24

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

tags: action, apathy, compassion, images

195 likes

#25

“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

94 likes

#26

“Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

87 likes

#27

“What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.”
― Susan Sontag

83 likes

#28

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

tags: addiction, aesthetics, consumerism, photography, society

181 likes

#29

“Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous”
― Susan Sontag

62 likes

#30

“Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.”
― Susan Sontag

129 likes

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