Top 15 Susan Sontag Quotes

My library is an archive of longings.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

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.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

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.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

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.

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.