Authors:

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 11

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

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

People, Interesting, Illness

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

As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.

Life, Art, Passion

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

Real, Self, Poet

The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.

Beauty, Beautiful, Overwhelmed

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.14, Macmillan

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.

Art, Axes, Ordinary

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

Photography, Art, Careers

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.93, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

Art, Ideas, Analysis

Passion paralyzes good taste.

Passion, Taste, Good Taste

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.40, Macmillan

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

Art, Intelligent, Moral

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.214, Macmillan

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

Photography, World, Feels

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.24, Macmillan

The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.

Sex, Past, Ignored

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

Literature, World, Circulatory System

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.226, Macmillan

The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.

Art, Giving, Purpose

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

Past, Reality, Way

"A Susan Sontag Reader".

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

Art, Moral, Physical Beauty

The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.

Government, Borders, World

"Why Are We in Kosovo?" by Susan Sontag, www.nytimes.com. May 2, 1999.

Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.

Ideas, People, Taste

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

Self, Building, Process

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.543, Macmillan

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

Suicide, Sex, Thinking

Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

Love Is, Thinking, Wings

War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.

War, Years, Long

"Why Are We in Kosovo?" by Susan Sontag, www.nytimes.com. May 2, 1999.

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

Writing, Talking, People

Source: ctheory.net

Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.

Oddities, Judgment, Accumulation

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.68, Macmillan

There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.

Elements, Pleasure, Position

Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling.

Thinking, Recycling, Procedures

Source: ctheory.net

You May Also Like: