Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

Susan Sontag

Top 10 Best Quotes

“It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”

“I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.”

“My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.”

“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”

“Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.”

“I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.”

“Passion paralyzes good taste.”

“It's so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way - but not wholly) relieve it. I must never forget it... I want sensuality and sensitivity, both... Let me never deny that... I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments.”

“Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.”

“What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -”

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Book Keywords:

lust, love, love-hurts, heartbreak, solitude