Susan Sontag Quotes

I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship — love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent.

[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement — not incitement.

I am tired. I would like to be a mountain, a tree, a stone.

Philosophy is an art form — art of thought or thought as art

Somewhere, some place inside myself, I am detached. I have always been detached (in part). Always.

The desire for reassurance. And, equally, to be reassured. (The itch to ask whether I’m still loved; and the itch to say, I love you, half-fearing that the other has forgotten, since the last time I said it.)

A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing _in_ the world, not just a text or commentary _on_ the world.

Part of the modern ideology of love is to assume that love and sex always go together, and probably the greatest problem for human beings is that they just don't

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

The problem isn’t that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs.

أشعر بأنني أتغيّر طوال الوقت، وهذا شيء يصعب تفسيره للناس.

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.

Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.

For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer.

I love to eat, even though it is easy for me not to eat (when no one feeds me, when there is no food around).