Susan Sontag Quotes

I do think the past changes at a slower rate. It sits a little more still for its portrait.

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

All states need to hallow themselves with the dignity of the past.

Well, there is something beautiful about ruins. I mean, in one sense it's not that different from going to Rome and looking at the Forum. But it's changing. It truly is. I'm optimistic but skeptical.

The pyramids of Egypt will not last a moment compared to the daisy.

Everything, no matter how beautiful, is only with us for awhile.

A withered maple leaf has left its branch and is falling to the ground; its movements resemble those of a butterfly in flight. Isn't it strange? The saddest and deadest of things is yet so like the gayest and most vital of creatures?

Look at light and admire its beauty. Close your eyes, and then look again: what you saw is no longer there; and what you will see later is not yet.

Neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is.

All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.

Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter's day, how beautiful the shadows are! Alas! It is the nature of their kind to be so. The loveliest things in life... are but shadows; and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these.

I think actresses are imagined to be these subjects of great vanity. Life is change; physicality changes. It's transient, and that's a beautiful and a painful thing.

Every thing that grows / Holds in perfection but a little moment.

The essence of what makes life beautiful is the fact that it can go away.

There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.

Nothing gold can stay.

The beauty of things must be that they end.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

I can't destroy things so beautiful." "Time will destroy them if you don't. Time destroys everything. But if you destroy them, it will mean something.

Impermanence is the very essence of joy-the drop of bitterness that enables one to perceive the sweet.

The entire most beautiful order of things that are very good, when their measures have been accomplished, is to pass away.

Yet even the brightest of sunrises must come to an end.