The only interesting answers are those which destroy the question.

—Susan Sontag

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About Susan Sontag

Portrait of Susan Sontag

Susan Lee Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer and critic. She primarily wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), On...

More quotations from Susan Sontag

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

—Susan Sontag

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death . . . as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

—Susan Sontag

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused. . . . If one feels that there is nothing "we" can do — but who is that "we"? — and nothing "they" can do either — and who are "they"? — then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic

—Susan Sontag

Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness — pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

—Susan Sontag

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

—Susan Sontag

More quotations tagged with “answers”

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

—M. Scott Peck

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There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

—Gertrude Stein

uncertainty answers

They want to hear that Buddhism is the answer to all of their problems, not a big fat arrow pointing to the source of all of their problems: ego.

—Shozan Jack Haubner in Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk

ego answers Buddhism

God answers all our prayers. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes the answer is "You've got to be kidding.

—Jimmy Carter

God prayer answers

I thought it must be fate that I kept bumping into him, some strange sign that he was meant to come back into my life and fix or change something, a voice from the past arriving in the present with the answers to everything.

—Sarah Dessen in That Summer

relationships past fate answers