sontag Quotes

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.”

“Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.”

“A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.”

“The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.”

“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.”

“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.”