Susan Sontag Quotes

People never think of entertainers as being human. When you walk out on stage, the audience think, 'Nothing can go wrong with them.' We get sick and we have headaches just like they do. When we are cut, we bleed.

Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.

You have an idea of the way you think it is, and it's not that way at all, it's something else.

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.

I see only the ideal. But no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth.

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

The world is always ending, for someone.

The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.

I'd like to walk that fine line between the authentic artist self and the manufactured artist self. I'd like to exist outside of a set of expectations or assumptions about what the Kehinde Wiley brand is. And I'd like to walk towards something that's a bit more unpredictable, human.

While growing up, I lived in my own fantasy world. I had kind of a rough childhood, so I created my own reality.

There are many people who consider love a dream, but they usually grow to think of marriage as the cold breakfast.

Grace is the most dangerous, expectation-wre cking, smile-creating, counterintuitiv e reality there is.

People say things like "it wasn't supposed to go this way" and "this isn't what I wanted." They're just making noise. There's no such thing as "supposed to," and what you want doesn't matter. All that matters is what happened.

An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.

Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.

Donald Trump lives in an alternative reality.

At the most simplistic level physicists tell us that what we see as reality is not actually accurate. A rock looks solid to us but it's full of empty space and atoms moving and we see it as solid because we need to because it helps us survive, right? Survival being our goal. You can extrapolate that to many other things.

There are many realities. There are many versions of what may appear obvious. Whatever appears as the unshakeable truth, its exact opposite may also be true in another context. After all, one's reality is but perception, viewed through various prisms of context.

If you draw the entire timeline of humanity from the time humans first trod until today, let's just assume that's 10 feet on a timeline. My time on that timeline is so small that you couldn't point it out. Let's say it's smaller than a grain of sand, in that whole 10-foot timeline of humanity. And when I lost my hearing, it happened to coincide with human technology advancing to the point that the cochlear implant existed. If I had lost my hearing five years earlier, I would have had to quit my job. I would have lost my career. I've always been kind of in awe of that reality.

That which we expect of life is indeed all that it ever can be.

Alone everything changes. Some might call it distorted reality but it's exactly the place I need to be.