Susan Sontag Life Quotations

Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.

Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

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

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.