A Quote by Susan Sontag

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

Susan Sontag

Quote Topics

Juxtaposition Quotations Surrealist Taste

Quote Author

Susan Sontag
American - Author
January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

Winston Churchill

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Susan Sontag

Rees's First Law of Quotations: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to George Bernard Shaw.

Nigel Rees

We sometimes think of quotations as extracts from larger texts, but some quotations originated complete unto themselves.

Gary Saul Morson

A wide range of quotations are necessary for the repertoire of a well-rounded speaker. Quotations are able to illustrate in a few words what is difficult to explain in many.

Carolyn Warner

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations.

Gary Saul Morson

Well named, Quotology contains everything you always wanted to know about quotations, quoters, quotees, quotation books, 'quoox' (quotations out of context), and their fascinating history.

Marjorie Garber

With all deference to Chairman Mao and other authors whose quotations derive from longer works, it seemed that I was becoming the world's first writer of self-contained ready-made quotations.

Ashleigh Brilliant

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.

Marcel Duchamp

Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them.

Gary Saul Morson

A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree--the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.

Anna Brownell Jameson

Just as the great oceans have but one taste, the taste of salt, so too there is but one taste fundamental to all true teachings of the way, and this is the taste of freedom.

Gautama Buddha

Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so also this teaching and discipline has one taste, the taste of liberation.

Gautama Buddha

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

Susan Sontag

Quotations are powerful tools. Michel de Montaigne, the father of all essayists, observed, 'I quote others only to better express myself.' Intrepid quotations detective Ralph Keyes helps us to discover the clear truth about exactly what was said and who exactly said it.