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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 16

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 don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

Wake Up, Passionate, Engagement

"Susan Sontag Finds Romance". Interview with Leslie Garis, www.nytimes.com. August 2, 1992.

Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world

Giving, World, Photograph

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.5, Macmillan

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

Simple, Making Love, Doe

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

Movie, Art, Ideas

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Failure, Criticism, Lapses

Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.

Funny, Secret, Television

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.178, Macmillan

[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.

Military, Health, Medicine

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

Life, Simple, Air

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.

Ideas, Mold, Tools

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

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

Life, Views, Modern

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

Self Confidence, Class, Lifestyle

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.

Risk, Danger, Dangerous

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

Taste, Cameras, Experts

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.93, Macmillan

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

People, Cameras, Unattractive

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.92, Macmillan

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

Memories, Past, Touching

Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.

Plato, Book, Self

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.96, Macmillan

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

Health, May, Imagine

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''

Art, Revenge, Order

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Art, Real, Criticism

Evergreen Review Dec. 1964

Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.

Everyday, Able, May

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

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

Art, Ideas, Nuisance

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.

Doubt, Photograph, Evidence

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.7, Macmillan

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

Silence, Waiting, Sound

Susan Sontag (2001). “In America: A Novel”, p.27, Macmillan

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

Dream, Self, Literature

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.147, Macmillan

To the militant, identity is everything.

Identity, Militant

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.10, Macmillan

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