The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. – Susan Sontag
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. – Susan Sontag
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. – Susan Sontag
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material. – Susan Sontag
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
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. – Susan Sontag
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. – Susan Sontag
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. – Susan Sontag
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. – Susan Sontag
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. – Susan Sontag
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects – making it possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing. – Susan Sontag
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. – Susan Sontag
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. – Susan Sontag
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. – Susan Sontag
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. – Susan Sontag
