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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 10

All Quotes Age Aids Anxiety Art Awareness Beauty Cancer Change Character Comedy Communism Community Consciousness Country Criticism Culture Death Desire Destiny Detachment Dying Energy Evidence Exercise Failing Feelings Funny Giving Health Heart History Identity Illness Imagination Inspiration Inspirational Journey Joy Judgment Language Life Literature Love Lust Lying Memories Metaphor Morality Nature Pain Painting Passion Past Perfection Photography Pleasure Pollution Purpose Quality Reading Reality Revenge Risk Sexuality Silence Style Suffering Surrealism Today Tradition Tragedy Transformation Travel Understanding Values Violence Waiting War Writing

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

Real, Reality

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.156, Macmillan

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

Atrocities, Firsts, Surprise

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.21, Macmillan

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Art, Pain, Bears

On Photography "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" (1977)

Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.

Avid, Sight, Want

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

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

Emotional, Needs, Passionate

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.174, Macmillan

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

Perspective, Exotic, Association

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

Photography, Men, Vocation

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.99, Macmillan

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Reading, Literature, Passports

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.266, Macmillan

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

Art, Writing, Mean

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

Photography, Art, Mean

I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.

Principles, Subliminal, Provinces

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.251, Macmillan

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

Witty, Exercise, Men

"Notes on 'Camp'" by Susan Sontag, note 54, (p. 291), 1964.

To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response.

Taste, Faculty, Response

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.160, Macmillan

The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.

Life, Spiritual, Athlete

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

Imagination, Growing, Disease

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

War, Health, Physicians

His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.

Hate, Elderly, Views

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Death, Religious, Dying

Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

Generations, Spirituality

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.81, Macmillan

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

Country, Equality, Thinking

It's almost as if this is the fundamental procedure in modern society: duplication and recycling.

Fundamentals, Recycling, Modern

Source: ctheory.net

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

Cancer, Medicine, Tuberculosis

Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism

Anxiety, Energy, Floating

The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.

Change, Historical, Intellectual

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Photography, Art, Real

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.63, Macmillan

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