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Exlpore more Solitude quotes
"I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented."
"O solitude, where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face? Better dwell in the midst of alarms, Than reign in this horrible place."
"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."
"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden."
"I inhale loneliness like it is the sweet smell of virgin earth conquered by fiery rain drops. Within me, I'm a thousand others."
"I have often wished in vain, ' said she, 'for another's judgment to appeal to when I could scarcely trust the direction of my own eye and head, they having been so long occupied with the contemplation of a single object as to become almost incapable of forming a proper idea respecting it.'That, ' replied I, 'is only one of many evils to which a solitary life exposes us."
"That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag
"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
"Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims."
"As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure."
"Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics."
"It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless."
"To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune."
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