Susan Sontag Quotes

Sanity is a cozy lie.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

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.

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.

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

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

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.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.

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.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

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 only 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.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

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.

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

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.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

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

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

Photographers are always imposing

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.