Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag Desire has no history. Susan Sontag desire The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Susan Sontag overwhelmed beautiful beauty I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't. Susan Sontag education silly book Cancer is a demonic pregnancy. Susan Sontag demonic cancer pregnancy One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. Susan Sontag selfishness messages want 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. Susan Sontag resistance community struggle The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses. Susan Sontag illness people interesting Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave. Susan Sontag courage fear people Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. Susan Sontag lapses failure criticism Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. Susan Sontag melancholy fit depression The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons. Susan Sontag passion strong love People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. Susan Sontag photography home travel Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois. Susan Sontag bourgeois surrealism universal With more people, there are more voices to tune out. Susan Sontag voice tunes people photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Susan Sontag grammar ethics photography Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation. Susan Sontag lying reality america ... liberal intellectualstend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping thatthose in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the "establishment. Susan Sontag wielding-power allies men Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism. Susan Sontag erotic wings reality Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual. Susan Sontag urban exotic intellectual In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. Susan Sontag keeping-a-journal persons journal
