850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

To the militant, identity is everything.

To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

What do I believe? In the private life, in holding up culture, in music, Shakespeare, old buildings…

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment - or arouses a necessary sympathy.

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, 'Alice, Alice, what is the answer?' Her companion replied, 'There is no answer.' Gertrude Stein continued, 'Well, then, what is the question?' and fell back dead.

Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.