It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
SUSAN SONTAGOur appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting’.
More Susan Sontag Quotes
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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Wherever people feel safe – they will be indifferent.
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I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
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Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
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No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.
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One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.
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I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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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.
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Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
SUSAN SONTAG