Susan Sontag Quotes

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past present and future.
Susan Sontag
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
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
Susan Sontag
Although none of the rules for becoming alive is valid it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Susan Sontag
Life is not about significant details illuminated in a flash fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.
Susan Sontag
Although none of the rules for becoming alive is valid it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Susan Sontag
Life is not about significant details illuminated in a flash fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.
Susan Sontag
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
Susan Sontag
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Susan Sontag
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural death is the obscene mystery the ultimate affront the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
Susan Sontag
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
Susan Sontag
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly.
Susan Sontag
One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.
Susan Sontag
The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.
Susan Sontag
Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. 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 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.
Susan Sontag
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. 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. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.
Susan Sontag
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 eroticfeelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.
Susan Sontag
To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.
Susan Sontag
Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing – which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.
Susan Sontag
If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.
Susan Sontag
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
Susan Sontag
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
Susan Sontag
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag
Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Susan Sontag
Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.
Susan Sontag
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay
Susan Sontag
This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.
Susan Sontag
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.
Susan Sontag
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, 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.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.
Susan Sontag
All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
Susan Sontag
I’m now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of ‘real’ aggressivity. I’m sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world.
Susan Sontag
I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
Susan Sontag
I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.
Susan Sontag
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.
Susan Sontag
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication
Susan Sontag
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
Susan Sontag
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
Susan Sontag
No such thing as a temptation. A temptation is a desire, a lust like any other - but one that we regret afterwards + wish undone (or that we know beforehand we will regret after). So it`s no excuse to say, ``I didn`t mean to do it. I was tempted + I couldn`t resist.`` All one can honestly say is, ``I did it. I`m sorry I did it.``- Reborn
Susan Sontag
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
Susan Sontag
We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Susan Sontag
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
Susan Sontag
One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.
Susan Sontag
All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
Susan Sontag
All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.
Susan Sontag
Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
Susan Sontag
If one could amputate part of one's consciousness...
Susan Sontag
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.
Susan Sontag