Susan Sontag Quotes

What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world?

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

Growing up, books were my lifeline, and I owe a debt to those writers that can never be repaid. They saved my sanity and gave me a world I could escape to. If I can pay that forward to another person, that's all I ask.

I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

I loved to read books in the free world, and there was a lot of time to sit around and do nothing in prison. When you read, it opens up your mind; it helped us take our minds away from where we were.

An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me.

When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.

There is hardly any grief that an hour's reading will not dissipate.

Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people's successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.

If you are lying in a tent in the Congo jungle, you don't want to be reading about rainforest biology. You want to be in a distant world.

I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.

When you're reading Chekov, you're in this world that he's created. I never would have created that world. I don't know anything about that time period or that setting or those groups of people or what those experiences were, but oh my gosh, it's amazing to daydream on it and put yourself there.

A library is many things, but particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books... Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had.

I'll live in another world, then.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

When I look back at what I've written and try to explain it, it doesn't help, but it helps to be in a process of writing. It's the same thing with reading - you lose yourself when you read as well. When I was younger I used literature that way, it was just escapism, a tool to run away from things.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.

His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life.

Because I am so intensely identified with opinion and analysis and contextualization, I think I just need, for my own psychological benefit, a small island in which I can stand and say, 'I'm going to sit this one out.'

Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise.

Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.

That's what I like about watching a movie: you enter an imagined world that's more interesting, more engaging than your own. Or less painful than your own.

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.