Authors:
  1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. S
  4. Susan Sontag
  5. Past

Susan Sontag Quotes about Past

All Susan Sontag 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 quotes 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
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

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

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Susan Sontag
Photography, Past, America
Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.61, Macmillan

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

Susan Sontag
Passion, Past, Photographer
Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.70, Macmillan

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Susan Sontag
Beauty, Time, Past
Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.69, Macmillan

The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.

Susan Sontag
Sex, Past, Ignored

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

Susan Sontag
Past, Reality, Way
"A Susan Sontag Reader".

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

Susan Sontag
Unrequited Love, Past, Devotion
Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Susan Sontag
Art, Past, Would Be

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.

Susan Sontag
Memories, Past, Touching

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

Susan Sontag
Insecure, Past, Space
Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.10, Macmillan

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Susan Sontag
Country, Giving Up, Past
Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.11, Macmillan

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

Susan Sontag
Past, Quality, Photograph
Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.22, Macmillan

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Susan Sontag
Past, Flux, Existence

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past-are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

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

You May Also Like: