Quotes from Susan Sontag

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

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

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

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

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

In 'life,' I don't want to be reduced to my work. In 'work,' I don't want to be reduced to my life.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.