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.

About 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

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

Men live in a fantasy world. I know this because I am one, and I actually receive my mail there.

—Susan Sontag

men and women

The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.

—Susan Sontag

History

1 Jan 2016 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

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.