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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 4

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

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

Photography, Cameras, Use

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.8, Macmillan

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Compassion, Bored, Cynical

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.101, Macmillan

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

Kind, Wanted

My library is an archive of longings.

Inspirational, Book, Reading

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.572, Macmillan

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Inspirational, Funny, Travel

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.11, Macmillan

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

Photography, Photographer, Preserves

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.58, Macmillan

I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.

Writing, Thinking, Order

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.169, Macmillan

It is not the position, but the disposition.

Inspirational, Motivational, Attitude

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Art, Propaganda, Intention

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

Inspiration, Writing, Guilt

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

Writing, Literature, Audience

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

Want

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.405, Macmillan

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

Hands, Way, Moral

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.114, Macmillan

Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy

Reality, Thinking, Fascination

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.23, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

Reality, Expectations, Humanity

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

Art, Successful, Transgression

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

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Get Well Soon, Health, Sick

New York Review of Books 26 Jan. 1978

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Writing, Ideas, Comeback

Susan Sontag (2013). “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, p.323, Penguin UK

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

Thinking, Attention, World

Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

Order, White, America

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

Evil, Needs, Blame

Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.74, Penguin UK

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

Writing, Giving, Way

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

Emotional, Giving, Understanding

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.100, Macmillan

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

Photography, Reality, Ideas

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.78, Macmillan

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Thinking, Sage, Paraphrase

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.118, Macmillan

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