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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 12

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

I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.

I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.

Believe, People, Brave

"The 'Traitor' Fires Back". Interview with David Talbot, www.salon.com. October 17, 2001.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

War, Weather, Affair

I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied, and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against women. Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about the ordeals of freedom-as well as a stirring account of the pleasures and deepening of consciousness that result from an encounter with great literature and with an inspired teacher.

Teacher, War, Reflection

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

Photography, Light, Resemblance Is

"On Photography".

Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.

Writing, Thinking, Typewriters

Source: ctheory.net

The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.

Spiritual, Journey, Voyages

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

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.

People, Different, Lists

Source: ctheory.net

I can't say I know how to change the society, but I share the feeling that this society is full of technology which depersonalizes people, which seems to drain a sense of reality from our lives. It's full of a lot of other things too.

Technology, Reality, People

Source: ctheory.net

If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there.

Art, Secular Society, Tasks

"Styles of Radical Will" by Susan Sontag, (p. 45), 1966.

One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.

Men, Thinking, Too Much

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.52, Macmillan

To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.

Taken, Seduction, Found

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

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

Writing, Interesting, Might

What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

Modern, Interest

Source: ctheory.net

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

Understanding, Promise, Ease

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

Unrequited Love, Past, Devotion

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

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.

Strong, World, Response

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.64, Macmillan

Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.

Successful, Self, Feelings

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.152, Macmillan

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

Taste, Juxtaposition, Surrealist

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

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Art, Revenge, Sensual

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

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up

Opening Up, Healthy, Ordinary

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images.

Photography, Reality, Way

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

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

Reality, Pieces, World

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.6, Macmillan

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

Unjust, Illness, Metaphor

Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.56, Penguin UK

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

Beauty, Art, Intellectual

[On marriage:] It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.

Feelings, Institutions, Committed

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.83, Macmillan

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