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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 5

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

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

Ironic, Collecting, Quotations

On Photography "Melancholy Objects" (1977)

One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

Play, Serious, Frivolous

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.174, Macmillan

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

Sex, Self, Secret

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.27, Macmillan

The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.

Attention, World, Pay

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

Photography, Mean, World

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

What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.

Views, Mourning, Celebrate

All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.

Photography, Memorable, Being Me

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.126, Macmillan

My skull is crammed with quotations.

Skulls, Quotations

Source: ctheory.net

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.

Writing, Thinking, Stamina

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.555, Macmillan

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

Photography, Numbers, Cameras

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.17, Macmillan

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Two, World, Extinction

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Funny, Book, Science

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Tragedy, Comedy, Detachment

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

I have been told that I am a "natural" feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.

Feminist, Facts, Problem

Source: ctheory.net

Photographers are always imposing

Photographer, Imposing

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

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

Photography, Cameras, Arms

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Photography, Book, Order

Susan Sontag (1978). “On photography”, Delta

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

Real, Political, Disease

Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.107, Penguin UK

Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.

Nature, Gun, People

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.16, Macmillan

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

Photograph, Instant, Maxims

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.22, Macmillan

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

Moving, Memorable, Looks

Susan Sontag (2014). “On Photography”, p.17, Penguin UK

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

Photography, Art, Real

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.129, Macmillan

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

Photography, Art, Twilight

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.16, Macmillan

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Photography, Real, Painting

New York Review of Books 23 June 1977

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.

People, Society, Liberty

Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.117, Penguin UK

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