Sontag, Susan Quotes

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-ut war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent -- war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.

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

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life -- its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness -- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.