850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

[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.

... courage is as contagious as fear.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.

Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character.

But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.

Kindness, kindness, kindness.I want to make a New year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.