Susan Sontag Quotes

For years, I looked down on my mother for shopping at Asda, and now I feel very ashamed of it.

It's so embarrassing and painful to be young.

Of course, I have my ways of getting into trouble. We all have times when we think, Oh my God, can the world please swallow me up and take me away from this?

I do have a little bit of trouble with candor around the things that I used to do. I think it's probably just resultant of shame and embarrassment and not wanting to be defined by the life that I used to live.

I know how much embarrassment hurts, and I love it as a theme because you can keep digging a hole. It's just an endless well, embarrassment.

Life is a series of embarrassing moments which leave you feeling alone in your confusion and shame

In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.' What is it then?' It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.

Now that he's gone, I feel like I'm a senior citizen who gave away her life savings over the phone. And this is the crux: I never in my life believed in someone as much as I believed in him. The shame is overwhelming.

Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

He, who survives his reputation, lives out of despite himself, like a man listening to his own reproach.

And indeed there will be time To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair.

Age whitens hairs, but not sin.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

What was the worst thing you've ever done? I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing.

Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, he would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.

I thought I'd had another few decades before my noise complaint years.

and nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old

A lover would find life less broken apart after a misguided love affair if they could feel that they had been sinful rather than foolish.

When one is undone—sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one’s own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery—much like a wobbly toddler or an unhinged politician, one immediately looks for someone else to blame. God. Your parents. Ex-girlfriends. Undocumented immigrants. Marvin in Human Resources. China.

I have given my all Funny how you could always make me feel small

Oh the saddest of sights in a world of sin Is the little lost pup with his tail tucked in.

It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush... It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face.

I could hear hopefulness in her voice, but also doubt. She was waiting for me to admit the obvious: I’d forgotten. I was toast. I was boyfriend roadkill.