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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 6

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

Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman,

Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.

Regret, Destiny, Men

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

Two, Creative, Culture

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.177, Macmillan

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

Dream, Memories, Book

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

Waiting, Solitude, Want

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.305, Macmillan

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

Photography, Photograph

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

World, Has Beens, Ifs

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Pain, Taken, People

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.7, Macmillan

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

Dream, Follow Your Dreams

Christine Allison, Susan Sontag (1978). “The benefactor: a novel”, Delta

I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.

Truth, Lying, Party

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.317, Macmillan

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.

Beautiful, Appreciation, Interesting

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.25, Macmillan

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

Fear, Disease, Sexuality

Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.

Wall, Book, Emotional

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.94, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Art, Needs, Hermeneutics

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.157, Macmillan

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

Reality, Citizens, Pollution

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

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

Art, Real, Knowing

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.146, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

Mind, Body, Crowds

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Silence, Speech, Form

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

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Ideas, People, Taste

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Guilt, Innocence, Logic

Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.71, Penguin UK

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

Jobs, Important, Savages

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

Dream, Witty, World

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.46, Macmillan

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

People, Mad, This Society

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.340, Macmillan

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

Cities, Empathy, Joy

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.50, Macmillan

The white race is the cancer of human history.

Cancer, Race, White

"What's Happening in America" (1966)

Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.

Ignorance, Disease, States

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

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