Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 3

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
Susan Sontag
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
Susan Sontag
No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
Susan Sontag
Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)
Susan Sontag
All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.
Susan Sontag
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
My library is an archive of longings.
Susan Sontag
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Susan Sontag
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.
Susan Sontag
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
Susan Sontag
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
Susan Sontag
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
Susan Sontag
Writing is a mysterious activity.
Susan Sontag
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.
Susan Sontag
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]
Susan Sontag
That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.
Susan Sontag
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Susan Sontag