Susan Sontag

1:My library is an archive of longings.
~ Susan Sontag,

2:What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive.
~ Susan Sontag,

3:The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste. ~ Susan Sontag,

4:Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
~ Susan Sontag,

5:We live under continued threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: Unremitting banality and inconceivable terror." ~ Susan Sontag,

6:I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard. ~ Susan Sontag,

7:Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves-how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one "role" to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I'm supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it's successfully executed. ~ Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh,

8:Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. ~ Susan Sontag,

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:Most of my reading is rereading. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

2:Writing is a mysterious activity. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

3:Taste has no system and no proofs. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

4:To photograph is to confer importance. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

5:Life is a movie; death is a photograph. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

6:Whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

7:The only interesting ideas are heresies. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

8:When we are nostalgic, we take pictures. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

9:Love dies because its birth was an error. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

10:Each generation has to reinvent spirituality. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

11:One can never ask anyone to change a feeling. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

12:Everything has changed and nothing is changed. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

13:False values begin with the worship of things. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

14:Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

15:I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

16:Today everything exists to end in a photograph. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

17:A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

18:Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

19:Few ever see what is not already inside their heads. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

20:Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

21:The really important thing is not to reject anything. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

22:My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

23:Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

24:Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

25:Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

26:I love to read the way people love to watch television. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

27:I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

28:Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

29:Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

30:A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

31:The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

32:What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

33:A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

34:The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

35:What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

36:... what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

37:The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

38:What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

39:I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

40:All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

41:Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

42:I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

43:One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

44:The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

45:All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

46:Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

47:I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

48:Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

49:I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

50:I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

51:Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

52:All great art contains at its centre contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

53:An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

54:Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

55:I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

56:The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

57:To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

58:Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

59:War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

60:The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

61:Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

62:War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

63:Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

64:Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

65:Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

66:The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

67:Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

68:Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

69:Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

70:The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

71:Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

72:Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

73:No &

74:What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

75:In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

76:In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

77:One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

78:Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

79:A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all &

80:To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

81:Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote - evolved from within consciousness itself. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

82:In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

83:It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

84:The process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

85:Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

86:Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

87:Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

88:The appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

89:To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

90:Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

91:The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

92:Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

93:The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

94:Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

95:Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

96:Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

97:We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance). ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

98:There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

99:The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

100:I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

101:Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

102:Can I love someone... and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

103:Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

104:The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

105:The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

106:Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

107:Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

108:Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

109:A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

110:The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

111:A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

112:Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

113: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, @wisdomtrove

114:In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

115:Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

116:Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

117:Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

118:Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

119:That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

120:There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

121:What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

122:Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

123:The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

124:When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

125:Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

126:Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

127: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

128:Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was &

129:When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

130:Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

131: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, @wisdomtrove

132: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, @wisdomtrove

133:I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

134:So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

135:By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

136: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

137:Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

138: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, @wisdomtrove

139: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

140:I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

141:A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

142:The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

143:Using quotations was at first quite spontaneous for me, but then this use became strengthened through reflection. But originally this practice came out of temperament. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

144:Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

145:Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

146: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, @wisdomtrove

147:The happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

148:To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

149: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

150:The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

151:It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

152:Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

153:The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

154:On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

155: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, @wisdomtrove

156: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, @wisdomtrove

157:If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

158: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

159:Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

160:I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

161:What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

162:Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

163:The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

164:I can't say I know how to change the society, but I share the feeling that this society is full of technology which depersonalizes people, which seems to drain a sense of reality from our lives. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

165:What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

166: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

167:America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

168:I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

169:Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

170:The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

171: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, @wisdomtrove

172:If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinema has access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

173:Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

174:Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

175:Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

176:The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

177:I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

178:To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

179:Writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

180:The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

181:Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

182: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." ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

183:Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

184:Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

185:I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

186:A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

187: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

188:Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

189:Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

190:Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

191:Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

192:The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

193: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

194: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

195: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, @wisdomtrove

196:I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

197:The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

198:We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

199: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

200:In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

201:Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

202:War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view &

203:Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

204: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… Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

205:Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

206:While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

207: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. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

208: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 &

209:Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

210: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 possess the past. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

211: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 &

212:Images anaesthetise. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... &

213:To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anaesthetise. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

214:Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

215:Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

216:The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and assertiveness it may not have had in the original. I think the quality of inaccessibility, the mystery, is important - that whatever matters can't be taken in on just one reading or one seeing. This is certainly a quality of the little of art that lasts. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

217:I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

218:War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

219:Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism - victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

220:The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

221:I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names. Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle and actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

222:We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Sanity is a cozy lie. ~ Susan Sontag,

2:To travel is to shop. ~ Susan Sontag,

3:Desire has no history. ~ Susan Sontag,

4:Desire has no history... ~ Susan Sontag,

5:God, living is enormous! ~ Susan Sontag,

6:Elites presuppose masses. ~ Susan Sontag,

7:You can always be quoted. ~ Susan Sontag,

8:Art is seduction, not rape. ~ Susan Sontag,

9:Courage is morally neutral. ~ Susan Sontag,

10:We are ruled by quotations. ~ Susan Sontag,

11:How boring just to be a body. ~ Susan Sontag,

12:My ignorance is not charming. ~ Susan Sontag,

13:Passion paralyzes good taste. ~ Susan Sontag,

14:Cancer is a demonic pregnancy. ~ Susan Sontag,

15:Art is a form of consciousness. ~ Susan Sontag,

16:Most of my reading is rereading. ~ Susan Sontag,

17:Photographers are always imposing ~ Susan Sontag,

18:Writing is a mysterious activity. ~ Susan Sontag,

19:Taste has no system and no proofs. ~ Susan Sontag,

20:Ideas disturb the levelness of life ~ Susan Sontag,

21:It is passivity that dulls feeling. ~ Susan Sontag,

22:My skull is crammed with quotations. ~ Susan Sontag,

23:What we need is to use what we have. ~ Susan Sontag,

24:... courage is as contagious as fear. ~ Susan Sontag,

25:I'm more cautious about what I write. ~ Susan Sontag,

26:Literature usually begets literature. ~ Susan Sontag,

27:My library is an archive of longings. ~ Susan Sontag,

28:Try not to live in a linguistic slum. ~ Susan Sontag,

29:To photograph is to confer importance. ~ Susan Sontag,

30:Communism is fascism with a human face. ~ Susan Sontag,

31:Life is a movie; death is a photograph. ~ Susan Sontag,

32:Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous ~ Susan Sontag,

33:The only interesting ideas are heresies ~ Susan Sontag,

34:whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars. ~ Susan Sontag,

35:I want to save my soul, that timid wind. ~ Susan Sontag,

36:My library is an archive of longings.
~ Susan Sontag,

37:Pleasure of tragedy is vicarious suicide ~ Susan Sontag,

38:To the militant, identity is everything. ~ Susan Sontag,

39:A good book is an education of the heart. ~ Susan Sontag,

40:Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer. ~ Susan Sontag,

41:Love dies because its birth was an error. ~ Susan Sontag,

42:Depression is melancholy minus its charms. ~ Susan Sontag,

43:I certainly identify myself as a feminist. ~ Susan Sontag,

44:But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures ~ Susan Sontag,

45:Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum. ~ Susan Sontag,

46:In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings. ~ Susan Sontag,

47:It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid. ~ Susan Sontag,

48:Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay ~ Susan Sontag,

49:Rules of taste enforce structures of power. ~ Susan Sontag,

50:It is not the position, but the disposition. ~ Susan Sontag,

51:Perversity is the muse of modern literature. ~ Susan Sontag,

52:Each generation has to reinvent spirituality. ~ Susan Sontag,

53:Lying is an elementary means of self-defense. ~ Susan Sontag,

54:One can never ask anyone to change a feeling. ~ Susan Sontag,

55:Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. ~ Susan Sontag,

56:War has been the norm and peace the exception ~ Susan Sontag,

57:Everything has changed and nothing is changed. ~ Susan Sontag,

58:False values begin with the worship of things. ~ Susan Sontag,

59:Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. ~ Susan Sontag,

60:Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. ~ Susan Sontag,

61:The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate. ~ Susan Sontag,

62:The white race is the cancer of human history. ~ Susan Sontag,

63:I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. ~ Susan Sontag,

64:Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. ~ Susan Sontag,

65:Shouting has never made me understand anything. ~ Susan Sontag,

66:Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech. ~ Susan Sontag,

67:To collect photographs is to collect the world. ~ Susan Sontag,

68:Today everything exists to end in a photograph. ~ Susan Sontag,

69:Books are funny little portable pieces of thought ~ Susan Sontag,

70:Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. ~ Susan Sontag,

71:A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing. ~ Susan Sontag,

72:I am sick of having opinions. I am sick of talking. ~ Susan Sontag,

73:The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. ~ Susan Sontag,

74:Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I. ~ Susan Sontag,

75:Few ever see what is not already inside their heads. ~ Susan Sontag,

76:If one could amputate part of one's consciousness... ~ Susan Sontag,

77:With more people, there are more voices to tune out. ~ Susan Sontag,

78:All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation. ~ Susan Sontag,

79:Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. ~ Susan Sontag,

80:In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. ~ Susan Sontag,

81:The really important thing is not to reject anything. ~ Susan Sontag,

82:The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. ~ Susan Sontag,

83:Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent. ~ Susan Sontag,

84:My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. ~ Susan Sontag,

85:Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love. ~ Susan Sontag,

86:Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody. ~ Susan Sontag,

87:Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina. ~ Susan Sontag,

88:When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in. ~ Susan Sontag,

89:Beware of anything that you hear yourself saying often. ~ Susan Sontag,

90:I love to read the way people love to watch television. ~ Susan Sontag,

91:Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. ~ Susan Sontag,

92:I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think. ~ Susan Sontag,

93:Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle. ~ Susan Sontag,

94:Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. ~ Susan Sontag,

95:To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. ~ Susan Sontag,

96:Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. ~ Susan Sontag,

97:Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals. ~ Susan Sontag,

98:Every collector is potentially (if not actually) a thief. ~ Susan Sontag,

99:He looked into the hole, and like any hole it said, Jump. ~ Susan Sontag,

100:Now the new things happening in France don't interest me. ~ Susan Sontag,

101:The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful ~ Susan Sontag,

102:...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. ~ Susan Sontag,

103:Wherever people feel safe (...) they will be indifferent. ~ Susan Sontag,

104:A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. ~ Susan Sontag,

105:Philosophy is an art form—art of thought or thought as art ~ Susan Sontag,

106:The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention. ~ Susan Sontag,

107:How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion! ~ Susan Sontag,

108:Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. ~ Susan Sontag,

109:There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. ~ Susan Sontag,

110:Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. ~ Susan Sontag,

111:What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern. ~ Susan Sontag,

112:El fotógrafo saquea y preserva, denuncia y consagra a la vez. ~ Susan Sontag,

113:I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it. ~ Susan Sontag,

114:The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man. ~ Susan Sontag,

115:The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local. ~ Susan Sontag,

116:A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. ~ Susan Sontag,

117:I don’ t want to learn anything from the failure of this love. ~ Susan Sontag,

118:Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more. ~ Susan Sontag,

119:The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions. ~ Susan Sontag,

120:En lugar de una hermenéutica, necesitamos una erótica del arte. ~ Susan Sontag,

121:...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it. ~ Susan Sontag,

122:What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work. ~ Susan Sontag,

123:Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. ~ Susan Sontag,

124:No está mal ser bella lo que está mal es la obligación de serlo. ~ Susan Sontag,

125:Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures ~ Susan Sontag,

126:What do I enjoy? Music, being in love, children, sleeping, meat. ~ Susan Sontag,

127:All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to. ~ Susan Sontag,

128:Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle. ~ Susan Sontag,

129:I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis. ~ Susan Sontag,

130:I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations. ~ Susan Sontag,

131:When the right person does the wrong thing, it’s the right thing. ~ Susan Sontag,

132:With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven. ~ Susan Sontag,

133:I vulgarize my feelings by speaking of them too readily to others. ~ Susan Sontag,

134:The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop. ~ Susan Sontag,

135:The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions. ~ Susan Sontag,

136:What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. ~ Susan Sontag,

137:I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets. ~ Susan Sontag,

138:Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world. ~ Susan Sontag,

139:The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences. ~ Susan Sontag,

140:The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. ~ Susan Sontag,

141:The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism. ~ Susan Sontag,

142:All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. ~ Susan Sontag,

143:Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. ~ Susan Sontag,

144:I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD. ~ Susan Sontag,

145:One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. ~ Susan Sontag,

146:Aphorisms are rogue ideas. ~ Susan Sontag (1933–2004), Journal entry, April 26, 1980,

147:…Because my wanting isn’t strong—it fears risks, it demands approval… ~ Susan Sontag,

148:I’ve become passive. I don’t invent, I don’t yearn. I manage, I cope. ~ Susan Sontag,

149:The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. ~ Susan Sontag,

150:I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied, ~ Susan Sontag,

151:Susan, Susan -- Poetry: aviation! Prose: infantry. [to Susan Sontag] ~ Joseph Brodsky,

152:the reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera ~ Susan Sontag,

153:Una fotografía es a la vez una pseudopresencia y un signo de ausencia. ~ Susan Sontag,

154:When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures. ~ Susan Sontag,

155:I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo-Conservatives. ~ Susan Sontag,

156:It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's. ~ Susan Sontag,

157:There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. ~ Susan Sontag,

158:All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears. ~ Susan Sontag,

159:Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person. ~ Susan Sontag,

160:Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person. ~ Susan Sontag,

161:In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs. ~ Susan Sontag,

162:Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex. ~ Susan Sontag,

163:I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. ~ Susan Sontag,

164:I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me. ~ Susan Sontag,

165:Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. ~ Susan Sontag,

166:Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists. ~ Susan Sontag,

167:I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. ~ Susan Sontag,

168:I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime. ~ Susan Sontag,

169:I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. ~ Susan Sontag,

170:In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity. ~ Susan Sontag,

171:I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting. ~ Susan Sontag,

172:The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. ~ Susan Sontag,

173:Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism. ~ Susan Sontag,

174:an expression of human consciousness, consciousness seeking to know itself. ~ Susan Sontag,

175:At the moment when “art” comes into being, the modern period of art begins. ~ Susan Sontag,

176:Being self-conscious. Treating one’s self as an other. Supervising oneself. ~ Susan Sontag,

177:I am only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. ~ Susan Sontag,

178:Toda a capacidade de compreender está enraizada na capacidade de dizer não. ~ Susan Sontag,

179:All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. ~ Susan Sontag,

180:La fotografía es, antes que nada, una manera de mirar. No es la mirada misma ~ Susan Sontag,

181:There's no changing the way people are. No one changes, everyone knows that. ~ Susan Sontag,

182:We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history. ~ Susan Sontag,

183:An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious. ~ Susan Sontag,

184:Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not. ~ Susan Sontag,

185:One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. ~ Susan Sontag,

186:[On marriage:] It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. ~ Susan Sontag,

187:Regenerative experiences: Plunge into the sea. The sun. An old city. Silence. ~ Susan Sontag,

188:Savaş fotoğraflarında güzellik görmek, kalpsizlikle eş anlamlı sayılmaktadır. ~ Susan Sontag,

189:Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism ~ Susan Sontag,

190:My loyalty to the past—my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most. ~ Susan Sontag,

191:Nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously. ~ Susan Sontag,

192:What do I enjoy?

Music
Being in love
Children
Sleeping
Meat ~ Susan Sontag,

193:I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature. ~ Susan Sontag,

194:I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature. ~ Susan Sontag,

195:The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence. ~ Susan Sontag,

196:To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. ~ Susan Sontag,

197:A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2. ~ Susan Sontag,

198:But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins. ~ Susan Sontag,

199:Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. ~ Susan Sontag,

200:…the war goes on—an ache in the bones, an ache in the gut, an ache in the heart. ~ Susan Sontag,

201:Aphoristic thinking is impatient thinking ~ Susan Sontag (1933–2004), Journal entry, May 6, 1980,

202:I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay. ~ Susan Sontag,

203:It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys. ~ Susan Sontag,

204:It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices. ~ Susan Sontag,

205:Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. ~ Susan Sontag,

206:That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life. ~ Susan Sontag,

207:War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather. ~ Susan Sontag,

208:Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. ~ Susan Sontag,

209:It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. ~ Susan Sontag,

210:All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable. ~ Susan Sontag,

211:I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way. ~ Susan Sontag,

212:Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world. ~ Susan Sontag,

213:Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything. ~ Susan Sontag,

214:The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute ~ Susan Sontag,

215:(When I look at my picture I read stubbornness, balked vanity, panic, vulnerability.) ~ Susan Sontag,

216:Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness. ~ Susan Sontag,

217:Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished. ~ Susan Sontag,

218:War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins. ~ Susan Sontag,

219:You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice. ~ Susan Sontag,

220:You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books. ~ Susan Sontag,

221:I am not myself with people [...] but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too. ~ Susan Sontag,

222:No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. ~ Susan Sontag,

223:No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. ~ Susan Sontag,

224:a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, ~ Susan Sontag,

225:Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. ~ Susan Sontag,

226:Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. ~ Susan Sontag,

227:[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing. ~ Susan Sontag,

228:Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies. ~ Susan Sontag,

229:For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. ~ Susan Sontag,

230:Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology. ~ Susan Sontag,

231:Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. ~ Susan Sontag,

232:Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize. ~ Susan Sontag,

233:She increases her burden of self-hatred, she behaves destructively with people she loves. ~ Susan Sontag,

234:Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not “Apocalypse Now” but “Apocalypse From Now On. ~ Susan Sontag,

235:Hay belleza o cuando menos interés en todo, si se ve con un ojo suficientemente perspicaz. ~ Susan Sontag,

236:There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things. ~ Susan Sontag,

237:The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. ~ Susan Sontag,

238:Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. ~ Susan Sontag,

239:To be sure, nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously. ~ Susan Sontag,

240:Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view. ~ Susan Sontag,

241:Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art ~ Susan Sontag,

242:Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. ~ Susan Sontag,

243:The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. ~ Susan Sontag,

244:The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates. ~ Susan Sontag,

245:The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication. ~ Susan Sontag,

246:Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through. ~ Susan Sontag,

247:The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded. ~ Susan Sontag,

248:Acho que não estou pronta para aprender como se escreve. Pensar com palavras, não com ideias. ~ Susan Sontag,

249:People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. ~ Susan Sontag,

250:Something is neutral only with respect to something else—like an intention or an expectation. ~ Susan Sontag,

251:The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois. ~ Susan Sontag,

252:The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication ~ Susan Sontag,

253:What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive. ~ Susan Sontag,

254:In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. ~ Susan Sontag,

255:In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one. ~ Susan Sontag,

256:One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life. ~ Susan Sontag,

257:Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman. ~ Edward Abbey,

258:A câmera faz com que todos sejam turistas na realidade alheia e, eventualmente, na sua própria. ~ Susan Sontag,

259:I am thinking—talking—in images. I don’t know how to write them down. Every feeling is physical. ~ Susan Sontag,

260:The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . . ~ Susan Sontag,

261:Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. ~ Susan Sontag,

262:What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive.
~ Susan Sontag,

263:It's almost as if this is the fundamental procedure in modern society: duplication and recycling. ~ Susan Sontag,

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

265:Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption. ~ Susan Sontag,

266:You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it. ~ Susan Sontag,

267:For Valéry, the nature of beauty is that it cannot be defined; beauty is precisely “the ineffable. ~ Susan Sontag,

268:Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs are. ~ Susan Sontag,

269:Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. ~ Susan Sontag,

270:Somewhere, some place inside myself, I am detached. I have always been detached (in part). Always. ~ Susan Sontag,

271:Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself. ~ Susan Sontag,

272:In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life. ~ Susan Sontag,

273:I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams ~ Susan Sontag,

274:Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more. ~ Susan Sontag,

275:The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both. ~ Susan Sontag,

276:To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production. ~ Susan Sontag,

277:To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings. ~ Susan Sontag,

278:In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ~ Susan Sontag,

279:It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall. ~ Susan Sontag,

280:I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. ~ Susan Sontag,

281:One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. ~ Susan Sontag,

282:(The Queen had real power, and a woman in power, feared as virile, is often accused of being a slut. ~ Susan Sontag,

283:What do I believe? In the private life, in holding up culture, in music, Shakespeare, old buildings… ~ Susan Sontag,

284:What we call nihilism (now) I simply call thought. What thinking doesn't lead to nihilism? (pg. 440) ~ Susan Sontag,

285:AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. ~ Susan Sontag,

286:Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust. ~ Susan Sontag,

287:I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry. ~ Susan Sontag,

288:It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first. ~ Susan Sontag,

289:Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.) ~ Susan Sontag,

290:The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. ~ Susan Sontag,

291:the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself. ~ Susan Sontag,

292:The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste. ~ Susan Sontag,

293:The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them. ~ Susan Sontag,

294:A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words. ~ Susan Sontag,

295:El tiempo termina por elevar casi todas las fotografías, aun las más inexpertas, a la altura del arte. ~ Susan Sontag,

296:The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste. ~ Susan Sontag,

297:To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master. ~ Susan Sontag,

298:Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them. ~ Susan Sontag,

299:Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. ~ Susan Sontag,

300:Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are. ~ Susan Sontag,

301:In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. ~ Susan Sontag,

302:Opinions are like some kind of crust that grows on top of things and you want to kind of peel them off. ~ Susan Sontag,

303:the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. ~ Susan Sontag,

304:The “Art Nouveau” appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. “I’m alive.” “I’m decorative. ~ Susan Sontag,

305:The problem isn’t that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs. ~ Susan Sontag,

306:When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese. ~ Susan Sontag,

307:An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that. ~ Susan Sontag (1933–2004), Journal entry, April 26, 1980,

308:A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, ~ Susan Sontag,

309:Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one. ~ Susan Sontag,

310:Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve. ~ Susan Sontag,

311:The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. ~ Susan Sontag,

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

313:La cámara transforma a cualquiera en turista de la realidad de otras personas, y a la larga de la propia. ~ Susan Sontag,

314:Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims. ~ Susan Sontag,

315:You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write. ~ Susan Sontag,

316:Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. ~ Susan Sontag,

317:Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. ~ Susan Sontag,

318:The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism. ~ Susan Sontag,

319:But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else. ~ Susan Sontag,

320:If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment. ~ Susan Sontag,

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

322:The early Romantic sought superiority by desiring, and by desiring to desire, more intensely than others do. ~ Susan Sontag,

323:The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart. ~ Susan Sontag,

324:Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much. ~ Susan Sontag,

325:Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much. ~ Susan Sontag,

326:Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself. ~ Susan Sontag,

327:Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. ~ Susan Sontag,

328:However painful they were, I needed my dreams—the metaphor for my introspection—if I was ever to be at peace. ~ Susan Sontag,

329:I love to eat, even though it is easy for me not to eat (when no one feeds me, when there is no food around). ~ Susan Sontag,

330:In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political. ~ Susan Sontag,

331:One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith. ~ Susan Sontag,

332:The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying. ~ Susan Sontag,

333:Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone. ~ Susan Sontag,

334:'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated. ~ Susan Sontag,

335:I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. ~ Susan Sontag,

336:To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. ~ Susan Sontag,

337:We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance). ~ Susan Sontag,

338:Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness. ~ Susan Sontag,

339:Women may be vain, but when a man is vain, it is beyond believing, for a man is willing to die for his vanity. ~ Susan Sontag,

340:I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all ~ Susan Sontag,

341:No sería erróneo hablar de una compulsión a fotografiar: a transformar la experiencia misma en una manera de ver. ~ Susan Sontag,

342:Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. ~ Susan Sontag,

343:... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience. ~ Susan Sontag,

344:There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position. ~ Susan Sontag,

345:The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility. ~ Susan Sontag,

346:The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses. ~ Susan Sontag,

347:You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even. ~ Susan Sontag,

348:Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. ~ Susan Sontag,

349:I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love. ~ Susan Sontag,

350: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,

351:It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power. ~ Susan Sontag,

352:Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same. ~ Susan Sontag,

353:Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. ~ Susan Sontag,

354:The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. ~ Susan Sontag,

355:The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony. ~ Susan Sontag,

356:The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one – or both. Usually both. – Susan Sontag ~ Susan Sontag,

357:Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings. ~ Susan Sontag,

358:Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. ~ Susan Sontag,

359:The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form. ~ Susan Sontag,

360:Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. ~ Susan Sontag,

361:Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society. ~ Susan Sontag,

362:A fotografia não se limita a reproduzir o real, recicla-o, o que constitui um processo-chave de uma sociedade moderna ~ Susan Sontag,

363:I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province. ~ Susan Sontag,

364:Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same. ~ Susan Sontag,

365:One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much. ~ Susan Sontag,

366:The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. ~ Susan Sontag,

367:The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. ~ Susan Sontag,

368:Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you. ~ Susan Sontag,

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

370:Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. ~ Susan Sontag,

371:Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail. ~ Susan Sontag,

372:The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. ~ Susan Sontag,

373:Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. ~ Susan Sontag,

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

375:People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term. ~ Susan Sontag,

376:Susan Sontag said in her journal, “I write to define myself—an act of self-creation—part of [the] process of becoming. ~ Timothy D Wilson,

377:Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament. ~ Susan Sontag,

378:A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all. ~ Susan Sontag,

379:In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, “Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.” Today, does everything exist to end online? ~ Sherry Turkle,

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

381:Time evaporate, money is always needed, comforts found where they were not expected and excitement dug up in barren ground. ~ Susan Sontag,

382:A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning. ~ Susan Sontag,

383:Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious. ~ Susan Sontag,

384:Así como la pintura se ha vuelto cada vez más conceptual, la poesía se ha definido cada vez más por su interés en lo visual. ~ Susan Sontag,

385:Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind’s need or capacity for self-estrangement. ~ Susan Sontag,

386:Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph. ~ Susan Sontag,

387:Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success. ~ Susan Sontag,

388:Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty. ~ Susan Sontag,

389:Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching. ~ Susan Sontag,

390:My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. ~ Susan Sontag,

391:Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind. ~ Susan Sontag,

392:There does come a point when you have to acknowledge you’re no longer postponing something and you really have made a choice. ~ Susan Sontag,

393:To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation. 4 ~ Susan Sontag,

394: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,

395:No one extraordinary appears to be entirely contemporary. People who are contemporary don’t appear at all: they are invisible. ~ Susan Sontag,

396:Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds. ~ Susan Sontag,

397:The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references. ~ Susan Sontag,

398:To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. ~ Susan Sontag,

399:The function of writing is to explode one’s subject—transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations). ~ Susan Sontag,

400:In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation. ~ Susan Sontag,

401:The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. ~ Susan Sontag,

402:What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. ~ Susan Sontag,

403:With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence. ~ Susan Sontag,

404:Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation. ~ Susan Sontag,

405:The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. ~ Susan Sontag,

406:Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic. ~ Susan Sontag,

407:Photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power. ~ Susan Sontag,

408:Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip. ~ Susan Sontag,

409:Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. ~ Susan Sontag,

410:Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading. ~ Susan Sontag,

411:This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased. ~ Susan Sontag,

412:Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling. ~ Susan Sontag,

413:That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true. ~ Susan Sontag,

414:There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work. ~ Susan Sontag,

415:The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness. ~ Susan Sontag,

416:What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment. ~ Susan Sontag,

417:Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
~ Susan Sontag,

418:Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas. ~ Susan Sontag,

419:One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness. ~ Susan Sontag,

420:Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois. ~ Susan Sontag,

421:There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. ~ Susan Sontag,

422:To look at something which is “empty” is still to be looking, still to be seeing something—if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations. ~ Susan Sontag,

423:Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes. ~ Susan Sontag,

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

425:Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ~ Susan Sontag,

426:The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall. ~ Susan Sontag,

427:A crisis of self-respect. What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work. I’m being wasted by self-pity and self-contempt. ~ Susan Sontag,

428:cada vez es menos factible reflexionar sobre nuestra experiencia siguiendo la distinción entre imágenes y cosas, entre copias y originales ~ Susan Sontag,

429: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,

430:The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched. ~ Susan Sontag,

431:When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled. ~ Susan Sontag,

432:Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others. ~ Susan Sontag,

433:«Al nacer, a todos se nos otorga una doble ciudadanía», escribe Susan Sontag, «la del reino de los sanos y la del reino de los enfermos.» ~ Leslie Jamison,

434:Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. ~ Susan Sontag,

435:Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable. ~ Susan Sontag,

436:Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it. ~ Susan Sontag,

437:The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. ~ Susan Sontag,

438: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

439:And suicide is the third, ultimate use of suffering—conceived of not as an end to suffering, but as the ultimate way of acting on suffering. ~ Susan Sontag,

440:Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air. ~ Susan Sontag,

441:I suffer from a chronic nausea—after I’m with people. The awareness (after-awareness) of how programmed I am, how insincere, how frightened. ~ Susan Sontag,

442: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,

443:Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to! ~ Susan Sontag,

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

445:İnsan sonsuza dek kraliçe kalamaz. Gücünü devam ettirebilmek için ya tahttan vazgeçeceksin, yahut da şehit edileceksin. Ben birincisini seçtim. ~ Susan Sontag,

446:It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones. ~ Susan Sontag,

447:It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter ~ Susan Sontag,

448:Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire ~ Susan Sontag,

449:The Cavaliere has retired to his study and reads, trying not to think about what is going on around him -- one of the principal uses of a book. ~ Susan Sontag,

450:When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used. ~ Susan Sontag,

451:I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of a greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing. ~ Susan Sontag,

452:No es del todo erróneo afirmar que no existe una mala fotografía, sino solo fotografías menos interesantes, menos relevantes, menos misteriosas. ~ Susan Sontag,

453:Observing that we have waged wars on poverty and drugs as well as cancer, Susan Sontag writes, “Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in ~ Eula Biss,

454:The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality. ~ Susan Sontag,

455:When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. ~ Susan Sontag,

456: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,

457:Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence… a way of being fully human. ~ Susan Sontag,

458: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,

459:Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure. ~ Susan Sontag,

460:Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. SUSAN SONTAG ~ Ellen J Langer,

461:Fotografiar es esencialmente un acto de no intervención. La persona que interviene no puede registrar; la persona que registra no puede intervenir. ~ Susan Sontag,

462: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,

463:The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons. ~ Susan Sontag,

464: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 a disease. ~ Susan Sontag,

465:I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about. ~ Susan Sontag,

466:One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful. ~ Susan Sontag,

467:So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. ~ Susan Sontag,

468:Alone, alone. I am alone – I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, I’m here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT. ~ Susan Sontag,

469:A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears. ~ Susan Sontag,

470:By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is. ~ Susan Sontag,

471:It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making. ~ Susan Sontag,

472:Fotografiar es apropiarse de lo fotografiado. Significa establecer con el mundo una relación determinada que parece conocimiento, y por lo tanto poder. ~ Susan Sontag,

473: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,

474:La actitud realmente seria es aquella que interpreta el arte como un medio para lograr algo que quizá sólo se puede alcanzar cuando se abandona el arte ~ Susan Sontag,

475:I’m in love. Don’t ask me how it’s possible. It’s just not in character; my nightmare-ridden, stubborn, melancholy character. And yet, it’s
happened. ~ Susan Sontag,

476:The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex. ~ Susan Sontag,

477:As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything. ~ Susan Sontag,

478: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,

479:Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done. ~ Edward Abbey,

480:We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? ~ Susan Sontag,

481:Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test. ~ Susan Sontag,

482:To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing. ~ Susan Sontag,

483:After discovering Susan Sontag, she explained to me that even meaning itself is a constructed concept, and I learned how to nod and pretend to understand. My ~ Hope Jahren,

484:Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised. ~ Susan Sontag,

485:Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing. ~ Susan Sontag,

486: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,

487:One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying. ~ Susan Sontag,

488:Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past. ~ Susan Sontag,

489: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,

490:A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short. ~ Susan Sontag,

491:In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way. ~ Susan Sontag,

492:Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon—one that’s as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology. ~ Susan Sontag,

493:10 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. ~ Susan Sontag,

494:But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all. ~ Susan Sontag,

495:Part of the modern ideology of love is to assume that love and sex always go together, and probably the greatest problem for human beings is that they just don't ~ Susan Sontag,

496:That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer. ~ Susan Sontag,

497:To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance. ~ Susan Sontag,

498:And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy. ~ Susan Sontag,

499: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

500:I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue. ~ Susan Sontag,

501:La pobreza no es más surreal que la riqueza; un cuerpo vestido con harapos mugrosos no es más surreal que una princesa vestida para un baile o un desnudo prístino. ~ Susan Sontag,

502:Only thing that counts are ideas. Behind ideas are [moral] principles. Either one is serious or one is not. Must be prepared to make sacrifices. I'm not a liberal. ~ Susan Sontag,

503:El más lógico de los estetas del siglo XIX, Mallarmé, afirmó que en el mundo todo existe para culminar en un libro. Hoy todo existe para culminar en una fotografía. ~ Susan Sontag,

504: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

505:What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship - ~ Susan Sontag,

506:Queremos que el fotógrafo sea un espía en la casa del amor y de la muerte y que los retratados no sean conscientes de la cámara, se encuentren con "la guardia baja". ~ Susan Sontag,

507:A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness. ~ Susan Sontag,

508:Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. —Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,

509:I have such strong tendencies to abandon myself to someone with whom I’m in love—to want to give up everything, to be possessed totally as well as to possess totally. ~ Susan Sontag,

510: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

511:Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy. ~ Susan Sontag,

512:It was not a question of knowledge...but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention. ~ Susan Sontag,

513:Photographs had the advantage of uniting two contradictory features. Their credentials of objectivity were inbuilt. Yet they always had, necessarily, a point of view. ~ Susan Sontag,

514:La historia de la fotografía podría recapitularse como la pugna entre dos imperativos diferentes: el embellecimiento, que proviene de las bellas artes, y la veracidad. ~ Susan Sontag,

515:The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game. ~ Susan Sontag,

516:Using quotations was at first quite spontaneous for me, but then this use became strengthened through reflection. But originally this practice came out of temperament. ~ Susan Sontag,

517:Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea. ~ Susan Sontag,

518:How far from the beginning are we? When did we first start to feel the wound? … This staunchless wound, the great longing for another place. To make this place another. ~ Susan Sontag,

519:I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up. ~ Susan Sontag,

520: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

521: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,

522:Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal. ~ Susan Sontag,

523: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,

524:Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store (which may also be an airport or a museum). ~ Susan Sontag,

525:The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants. ~ Susan Sontag,

526:To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power. ~ Susan Sontag,

527: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,

528:Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and an object of surveillance (for rulers). ~ Susan Sontag,

529:In fact, words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture’s meaning. ~ Susan Sontag,

530:The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art. ~ Susan Sontag,

531:The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected. ~ Susan Sontag,

532:In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain. ~ Susan Sontag,

533: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

534:As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. ~ Susan Sontag,

535:Images of the sufferings endured in war are so widely disseminated now that it is easy to forget how recently such images became what is expected from photographers of note. ~ Susan Sontag,

536:Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again. ~ Susan Sontag,

537: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

538:The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence. ~ Susan Sontag,

539:It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake. ~ Susan Sontag,

540:photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. ~ Susan Sontag,

541:The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer. ~ Susan Sontag,

542:Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined). ~ Susan Sontag,

543:the pollution of American space...brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us. ~ Susan Sontag,

544:Esto es lo que hace la guerra. Y aquello es lo que hace, también. La guerra rasga, desgarra. La guerra rompe, destripa. La guerra abrasa. La guerra desmembra. La guerra arruina. ~ Susan Sontag,

545:On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone. ~ Susan Sontag,

546:I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. ~ Susan Sontag,

547: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,

548:Walking onto his terrace those first months to see in the distance the well-behaved mountain sitting under the sun might provoke a reverie about the calm that follows catastrophe. ~ Susan Sontag,

549:A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness. ~ Susan Sontag,

550:I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum. ~ Susan Sontag,

551:Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are ~ Susan Sontag,

552:She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies. ~ Susan Sontag,

553:If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories. ~ Susan Sontag,

554:To photograph people is to violate them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. ~ Susan Sontag,

555:AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them. ~ Susan Sontag,

556:In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity. ~ Susan Sontag,

557:That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity. ~ Susan Sontag,

558:Fotografiar es conferir importancia. Quizás no haya tema que no pueda ser embellecido; es más, no hay modo de suprimir la tendencia intrínseca de toda fotografía a dar valor a sus temas. ~ Susan Sontag,

559: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

560:... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve. ~ Susan Sontag,

561:Pašovi invited me to see his Grad (City), a collage, with music, of declamations, partly drawn from texts by Constantine Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Sylvia Plath, using a dozen actors; ~ Susan Sontag,

562:I feel profoundly alone, cut off, unattractive…I feel unloveable. But I respect that unloveable solider—struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just, honourable. I respect myself. ~ Susan Sontag,

563:There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves. ~ Susan Sontag,

564:Ninguna definición compleja de lo que es o podrá ser la fotografía atenuará jamás el placer deparado por una foto de un hecho inesperado que capta a mitad de la acción un fotógrafo alerta. ~ Susan Sontag,

565:Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting. ~ Susan Sontag,

566:The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste. ~ Susan Sontag,

567:The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community. ~ Susan Sontag,

568:The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it. ~ Susan Sontag,

569:Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. ~ Susan Sontag,

570:A completely open, unpredictable future makes me horribly anxious… It’s as if I’m supposed to walk through a forest without being allowed to inform myself whether or not it’s full of wolves. ~ Susan Sontag,

571:A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. ~ Susan Sontag,

572:Es harto sabido que cuando las personas se aventuran por los confines últimos de la consciencia , arriesgan su cordura, o lo que es lo mismo, su humanidad.

La Imaginación Pornográfica ~ Susan Sontag,

573:I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard. ~ Susan Sontag,

574:Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it. ~ Susan Sontag,

575:The longing to touch / be touched. I feel gratitude when I touch someone—as well as affection, etc. The person has allowed me proof that I have a body—and that there are bodies in the world. ~ Susan Sontag,

576:There is only so much revealing one can do. For every self-revelation, there has to be a self-concealment. A life-long commitment to writing involves a balancing of these incompatible needs. ~ Susan Sontag,

577:Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn. ~ Susan Sontag,

578:I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard. ~ Susan Sontag,

579:What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy. ~ Susan Sontag,

580:Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease. ~ Susan Sontag,

581:The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more. ~ Susan Sontag,

582:What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up ~ Susan Sontag,

583:I think that there is generally less of a community and that the fragmentation of the left is a symptom. I think that it is less and less possible to take for granted certain cultural references. ~ Susan Sontag,

584:La sabiduría esencial de la imagen fotográfica afirma: «Ésa es la superficie. Ahora piensen —o más bien sientan, intuyan— qué hay más allá, cómo debe de ser la realidad si ésta es su apariencia». ~ Susan Sontag,

585:My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language. ~ Susan Sontag,

586:To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. ~ Susan Sontag,

587: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

588:I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't. ~ Susan Sontag,

589: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

590:El vasto catálogo fotográfico de la miseria y la injusticia en el mundo entero le ha dado a cada cual determinada familiaridad con lo atroz, volviendo más ordinario lo horrible, haciéndolo familiar. ~ Susan Sontag,

591:(...) muitos fotógrafos continuam a preferir imagens a preto e branco, pois consideram-nas mais delicadas e sóbrias do que a cor - ou menos "voyeuristas" e menos sentimentais ou cruamente miméticas. ~ Susan Sontag,

592:The beauty of modern cities consists in a sense of their power, cruelty, impersonality, massiveness, + variety (as in New York or London) seen against the architectural vestiges of a beautiful past. ~ Susan Sontag,

593:Hakkın ve haklılığın bir tarafta, baskı ve adaletsizliğin diğer tarafta yer aldığına ve kavganın sürdürülmesi gerektiğine inananlar açısından önemli olan, tam da kimin, kim tarafından öldürüldüğüdür. ~ Susan Sontag,

594: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,

595:For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it—then you know. The south has got you. * ~ Susan Sontag,

596: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

597: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

598: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

599:Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. ~ Susan Sontag,

600:Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. ~ Susan Sontag,

601: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,

602:The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads - as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. ~ Susan Sontag,

603:The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still. ~ Susan Sontag,

604:The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer - a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases. ~ Susan Sontag,

605:America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent. ~ Susan Sontag,

606:I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive. ~ Susan Sontag,

607:Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories. ~ Susan Sontag,

608:A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture ~ Susan Sontag,

609:The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo. ~ Susan Sontag,

610:Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual. ~ Susan Sontag,

611:If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space. ~ Susan Sontag,

612:The desire for reassurance. And, equally, to be reassured. (The itch to ask whether I’m still loved; and the itch to say, I love you, half-fearing that the other has forgotten, since the last time I said it.) ~ Susan Sontag,

613: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,

614:Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control. ~ Naomi Wolf,

615:I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden. ~ Susan Sontag,

616:Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations. ~ Susan Sontag,

617:For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering. ~ Susan Sontag,

618:“Healthy" and “diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control. ~ Naomi Wolf,

619:Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world ~ Susan Sontag,

620:I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact "importing", I stopped doing it. ~ Susan Sontag,

621:Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others. ~ Susan Sontag,

622:Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. ~ Susan Sontag,

623: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

624:Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave. ~ Susan Sontag,

625:There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. ~ Susan Sontag,

626:In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is. ~ Susan Sontag,

627:My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license. ~ Susan Sontag,

628:I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I am tired. ~ Susan Sontag,

629:The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place. ~ Susan Sontag,

630:The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. ~ Susan Sontag,

631:Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. ~ Susan Sontag,

632:Creo que lo más importante a la hora de escribir es pensar que algún lector necesitado espera con ansias ese texto. Comencé a escribir pensando en lo que quería leer. Si mantienes esa premisa, quieras o no, serás honesto. ~ Susan Sontag,

633: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,

634:I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony. ~ Susan Sontag,

635:Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it. ~ Susan Sontag,

636:To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement. ~ Susan Sontag,

637:Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. ~ Susan Sontag,

638: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.'' ~ Susan Sontag,

639:writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed. ~ Susan Sontag,

640:In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all. ~ Susan Sontag,

641:The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all. ~ Susan Sontag,

642: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

643:In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed. ~ Susan Sontag,

644:Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom. ~ Susan Sontag,

645:Rüyaların yasaklanmamasına hayret ediyorum. Rüya ne büyük bir vaat! Ne büyük zevk! Ne kadar özel! Hem insana bir eş de gerekmez; kadın veya erkek, kimsenin işbirliğine gerek yok. Rüyalar, ruhun tamama ermemiş cinsel eylemidir. ~ Susan Sontag,

646:[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement -- not incitement. ~ Susan Sontag,

647:A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003] ~ Susan Sontag,

648:Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently. ~ Susan Sontag,

649:The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. ~ Susan Sontag,

650:Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies. ~ Susan Sontag,

651:And the cancer deaths of those harder to describe as losers, like Freud and Wittgenstein, have been diagnosed as the gruesome penalty exacted for a lifetime of instinctual renunciation. (Few remember that Rimbaud died of cancer.) ~ Susan Sontag,

652:I think I feel better. I look at everything from the other end—instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy. ~ Susan Sontag,

653:Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism. ~ Susan Sontag,

654:Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. ~ Susan Sontag,

655:What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such—of what lies beyond the human and the made—and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all. ~ Susan Sontag,

656:Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists. ~ Susan Sontag,

657:I can't say I know how to change the society, but I share the feeling that this society is full of technology which depersonalizes people, which seems to drain a sense of reality from our lives. It's full of a lot of other things too. ~ Susan Sontag,

658: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,

659: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,

660: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

661:I was thinking, Ursula said . . . that the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show 'still.' You can just show him being live. ~ Susan Sontag,

662: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,

663:I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers. ~ Susan Sontag,

664:Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.) ~ Susan Sontag,

665:Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if we could not forget ourselves, at least some of the time? Who would we be if we could not learn? Forgive? Become something other than we are? ~ Susan Sontag,

666:A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. ~ Susan Sontag,

667:A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. ~ Susan Sontag,

668: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

669:To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. ~ Susan Sontag,

670:A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way. ~ Susan Sontag,

671: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 ~ Susan Sontag,

672:A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. ~ Susan Sontag,

673:Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all. ~ Susan Sontag,

674: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

675:Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness. ~ Susan Sontag,

676:Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. ~ Susan Sontag,

677: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,

678: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

679:The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured. ~ Susan Sontag,

680:American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism ~ Susan Sontag,

681:Image of an image of an image... But to record all the dips and upswings, in a sense falsifies them, and I start deluding myself and thinking all this is, or might be, real. Enough to play the game, or try to play it. A mistake to tally up the score. ~ Susan Sontag,

682: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

683:The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas. ~ Susan Sontag,

684:The flâneur is not attracted to the city’s official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations—an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer “apprehends,” as a detective apprehends a criminal. ~ Susan Sontag,

685:Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods. ~ Susan Sontag,

686:Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture. ~ Susan Sontag,

687:What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed. ~ Susan Sontag,

688:Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence. ~ Susan Sontag,

689:The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. ~ Susan Sontag,

690:Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. ~ Susan Sontag,

691:The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair. ~ Susan Sontag,

692: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

693: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,

694:Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards. ~ Susan Sontag,

695: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,

696:Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music. ~ Susan Sontag,

697: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

698: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,

699:Dzisiaj przyszła mi do głowy pewna myśl - tak jasna i oczywista! W pierwszej chwili wydała mi się wręcz niedorzeczna, wprawiła mnie w oszołomienie i wręcz lekką histerię - Mogę zrobić absolutnie wszystko i poza mną samą nie istnieje nic, co by mnie powstrzymało. ~ Susan Sontag,

700:to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies. ~ Susan Sontag,

701:Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. ~ Susan Sontag,

702:It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little—have few verbal means. Eloquence—thinking in words—is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. ~ Susan Sontag,

703:Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, 'Alice, Alice, what is the answer?' Her companion replied, 'There is no answer.' Gertrude Stein continued, 'Well, then, what is the question?' and fell back dead. ~ Susan Sontag,

704:I am scared, numbed from the marital wars - that deadly, deadening combat which is the opposite, the antithesis of the sharp painful struggles of lovers. Lovers fight with knives and whips, husbands and wives poisoned marshmallows, sleeping pills, and wet blankets. ~ Susan Sontag,

705: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,

706:The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some of the pressures on women which I was lucky enough to have escaped, perhaps because of my eccentricity or the oddness of my upbringing. ~ Susan Sontag,

707:The most precious thing is vitality—not in any sinister Lawrentian sense, but just the will+energy+appetite to do what one wants to do+not to be ‘sunk’ by disappointments. Aristotle is right: happiness is not to be aimed at; it is a by-product of activity aimed at. ~ Susan Sontag,

708:...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies. ~ Susan Sontag,

709:None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. ~ Susan Sontag,

710:The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias. ~ Susan Sontag,

711: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,

712:It is in the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making. ~ Susan Sontag (1933–2004), American essayist. 'Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes', Introduction, Barthes: Selected Writings (1982),

713:Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist’s competence, his responsible sense of vocation—and therefore as an aggression against them. Modern ~ Susan Sontag,

714:War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. ~ Susan Sontag,

715:I have been told that I am a "natural" feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things. ~ Susan Sontag,

716:The most precious thing is vitality—not in any sinister Lawrentian sense, but just the will + energy + appetite to do what one wants to do + not to be ‘sunk’ by disappointments. Aristotle is right: happiness is not to be aimed at; it is a by-product of activity aimed at. ~ Susan Sontag,

717:Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov. ~ Susan Sontag,

718:The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. ~ Susan Sontag,

719:We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying. ~ Susan Sontag,

720: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

721:In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences. ~ Susan Sontag,

722:... liberal intellectualstend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping thatthose in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the "establishment. ~ Susan Sontag,

723:Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images. ~ Susan Sontag,

724:The most precious thing is vitality – not in any sinister Lawrentian sense, but just the will + energy + appetite to do what one wants to do + not to be ‘sunk’ by disappointments. Aristotle is right: happiness is not to be aimed at; it is a by-product of activity aimed at. ~ Susan Sontag,

725:One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not. ~ Susan Sontag,

726:His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him. ~ Susan Sontag,

727:La necesidad de confirmar la realidad y dilatar la experiencia mediante fotografías es un consumismo estético al que hoy todos son adictos. Las sociedades industriales transforman a sus ciudadanos en yonquis a las imágenes; es la forma más irresistible de contaminación mental. ~ Susan Sontag,

728:Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. ~ Susan Sontag,

729:The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. ~ Susan Sontag,

730:25/12/48
É muito provável que ao lembrar-me disso, um dia, eu ache muita graça. Assim como houve um tempo em que eu era religiosa de um modo neurótico e aterrorizado e achava que um dia seria católica, agora acho que tenho tendências lésbicas (com que relutância escrevo isto) – ~ Susan Sontag,

731:A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol - is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry. ~ Susan Sontag,

732: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

733:The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed. ~ Susan Sontag,

734:Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own. ~ Susan Sontag,

735:Two weeks after the flight of the government from Naples, the French moved an army of six thousand soldiers into the city, and by late January a cabal of enlightened aristocrats and professors had engendered a monstrosity that called itself the Parthenopean or Vesuvian Republic. Most ~ Susan Sontag,

736:Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing. ~ Susan Sontag,

737:The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. ~ Susan Sontag,

738:Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide. ~ Susan Sontag,

739:Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love. ~ Susan Sontag,

740:Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock. ~ Susan Sontag,

741: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

742:Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum. ~ Susan Sontag,

743:A necessidade de comprovar a realidade e de engrandecer a experiência através das fotografias é uma forma de consumismo estético a que todos nos entregamos. As sociedades industriais transformam os seus cidadãos em viciados de imagens; trata-se da mais irresistível forma de poluição mental ~ Susan Sontag,

744:With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses. ~ Susan Sontag,

745: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

746:I received a letter from a close friend. I did not open it for a week. It lay smoldering on my night table. The envelope bearing the name of a mere acquaintance I tore open eagerly as I came up the stairs, confident that the letter inside would contain nothing that could disturb me or hurt me. ~ Susan Sontag,

747:Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes. ~ Susan Sontag,

748:What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art. ~ Susan Sontag,

749:Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms. ~ Susan Sontag,

750:Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception. ~ Susan Sontag,

751:Quando faço uma fotografia", escreve Siskind, "quero que seja um objeto onovo, completo e autosuficiente, cuja condição básica é a ordem." Para Cartier-Bresson, tirar fotografias é "encontrar a estrutura do mundo, deleitar-se com o prazer puro da forma", revelar que "em todo este caos, há ordem". ~ Susan Sontag,

752: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

753:Someone who is permanently 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. ~ Susan Sontag,

754: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

755:I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark-card store, and I used to save up my allowance and would buy them all. I even bought real lemons like Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations [laughing]. I thought everything in the Modern Library must be great. ~ Susan Sontag,

756:Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For 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. ~ Susan Sontag,

757:While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. ~ Susan Sontag,

758: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,

759: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

760:One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience. ~ Susan Sontag,

761:O fotógrafo é um superturista, um prolongamento do antropólogo, que visita os nativos e regressa com notícias dos seus costumes exóticos e estranhos ornamentos. O fotógrafo procura sempre colonizar novas experiências ou encontrar novos modos de olhar para temas familiares - para lutar contra o tédio. ~ Susan Sontag,

762:The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. ~ Susan Sontag,

763:In the 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, comfortable. ~ Susan Sontag,

764:Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it. ~ Susan Sontag,

765:Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy. ~ Susan Sontag,

766:Para trascender el cuerpo, hay que pasar por un período de desenfreno físico y blasfemia verbal, sobre el principio de que sólo cuando la moral ha sido deliberadamente pisoteada, es capaz el individuo de una transformación radical: entrar en un estado de gracia que deja atrás todas las categorías morales. ~ Susan Sontag,

767: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,

768:The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us. ~ Susan Sontag,

769:Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions. ~ Susan Sontag,

770:The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals. ~ Susan Sontag,

771:Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. ~ Susan Sontag,

772: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,

773:Work is experienced as discipline--the background of which is ascesis--even though it also gives pleasure. One is allowed to become "depersonalized" in work, to forget the self (to lose contact with its most intimate feelings and needs)--indeed all that is necessary if one is to give oneself fully to the work. ~ Susan Sontag,

774:A fotografia, mais recentemente, transformou-se num divertimento tão praticado como o sexo e a dança, o que significa que, como todas as formas de arte de massas, a fotografia não é praticada pela maioria das pessoas como arte. É sobretudo um rito social, uma defesa contra a ansiedade e um instrumento de poder. ~ Susan Sontag,

775: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. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration. ~ Susan Sontag,

776:Recientemente la fotografía se ha transformado en una diversión casi tan cultivada como el sexo y el baile, lo cual significa que la fotografía, como toda forma artística de masas, no es cultivada como tal por la mayoría. Es sobre todo un rito social, una protección contra la ansiedad y un instrumento de poder. ~ Susan Sontag,

777:It's so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way - but not wholly) relieve it. I must never forget it... I want sensuality and sensitivity, both... Let me never deny that... I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments. ~ Susan Sontag,

778:One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits. ~ Susan Sontag,

779:Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human. ~ Susan Sontag,

780:Interpretation must itself be
evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts,
interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping
the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly,
stifling. ~ Susan Sontag,

781: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 ~ Susan Sontag,

782:A portrait that declines to name its subject becomes complicit, if inadvertendy in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photograph: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights. ~ Susan Sontag,

783:They should whistle at men in the streets, aid beauty parlors, picket toy manufacturers who produce sexist toys, convert in sizable numbers to militant lesbianism, provide feminist divorce counseling, establish make-up withdrawal centers, adopt their mothers' family names." - The Third World of Women, Partisan Review ~ Susan Sontag,

784:Sufrir es una cosa; otra es convivir con las imágenes fotográficas del sufrimiento, que no necesariamente fortifican la conciencia ni la capacidad de compasión. También pueden corromperlas. Una vez que se han visto tales imágenes, se recorre la pendiente de ver más. Y más. Las imágenes pasman. Las imágenes anestesian. ~ Susan Sontag,

785:We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?"

[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003] ~ Susan Sontag,

786:Everyone else not real-very distant, small figures. I would have to swim a thousand miles to reach the margin of the relationship, on the other side of which might lie other people, and it was too far, I was too tired.
The almost infinitely extending network of that relationship; its dense weave That's what held me- ~ Susan Sontag,

787:My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. With him I have neither, neither privacy or passion. Neither the heightening of self which is won by privacy and loneliness, nor the splendid heroic beautiful loss of self that accompanies passion. ~ Susan Sontag,

788: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

789:The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it. ~ Susan Sontag,

790:To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize. ~ Susan Sontag,

791: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,

792:The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination. ~ Susan Sontag,

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

Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if we could not forget ourselves, at least some of the time? Who would we be if we could not learn? Forgive? Become something other than we are? ~ Susan Sontag,

794:We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right. ~ Susan Sontag,

795: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,

796: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,

797:Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought. ~ Susan Sontag,

798:A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. Not only because it can always be added to, but because it is already too much. The collector’s need is precisely for excess, for surfeit, for profusion. It’s too much—and it’s just enough for me. … A collection is always more than is necessary. ~ Susan Sontag,

799:[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies. ~ Susan Sontag,

800:One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment . . . and I don’t believe it’s true. . . . I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking. ~ Susan Sontag,

801:It used to be thought, when the candid images were not common, that showing something that needed to be seen, bringing a painful reality closer, was bound to goad viewers to feel more. In a world in which photography is brilliantly at the service of consumerist manipulations, no effect of a photograph of a doleful scene can be taken for granted. ~ Susan Sontag,

802:Look, what I want is to be fully present in my life - to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself in your life, giving full attention to the world, which includes you. You are not the world, the world is not identical to you, but you're in it and paying attention to it. That's what a writer does - a writer pays attention to the world. ~ Susan Sontag,

803:Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature. ~ Susan Sontag,

804:La fotografía, que tiene tantos usos narcisistas, también es un instrumento poderoso para despersonalizar nuestra relación con el mundo; y ambos usos son complementarios. Como unos binoculares cuyos extremos pueden confundirse, la cámara vuelve íntimas y cercanas las cosas exóticas, y pequeñas, abstractas, extrañas y lejanas las cosas familiares. ~ Susan Sontag,

805:The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction. ~ Susan Sontag,

806: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,

807:I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex."
- A Woman of No Importance

45. Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture. ~ Susan Sontag,

808:Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. ~ Susan Sontag,

809: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,

810:A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. ~ Susan Sontag,

811:Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction....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,

812:I remember expressing amazement (+ feeling superior) when Harriet said once in Paris that she didn`t know whether or not she had been in love with someone. I couldn`t understand what she was talking about. I said that had never happened to me. Of course not. Since for me being in love is deciding: I`m in love + sticking to it, I`m always well informed.
-Reborn ~ Susan Sontag,

813:Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. Cancerphobia taught us the fear of a polluting environment; now we have the fear of polluting people that AIDS anxiety inevitably communicates. Fear of the Communion cup, fear of surgery: fear of contaminated blood, whether Christ's blood or your neighbor's. ~ Susan Sontag,

814:The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But for that it is necessary to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power. ~ Susan Sontag,

815:Hepimiz gecede bir kez, ayda bir kez, yılda bir kez maskelerimizi değiştirsek ne olur?" dedi. "Mesleğinin, sınıfının, yurttaşlığının, görüşlerinin maskelerini. Karı kocanın, anne baba ve çocuğun, efendi ve kölenin maskelerini. Hatta bedenin maskelerini -erkek ve dişi, çirkin ve güzel, yaşlı ve genç. Çoğu erkek hiç karşı çıkmadan maskelerini takıyor ve ömür boyu çıkarmıyor. ~ Susan Sontag,

816:Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies. ~ Susan Sontag,

817:It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless. ~ Susan Sontag,

818:It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech. ~ Susan Sontag,

819:The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer — delicately you added: all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.) ~ Susan Sontag,

820:One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another. ~ Susan Sontag,

821:[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated. ~ Susan Sontag,

822:Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic. ~ Susan Sontag,

823:Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment. ~ Susan Sontag,

824:Nothing is invented; nothing is extraneous. Cancer’s life is a recapitulation of the body’s life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,

825: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,

826:It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
- Lady Windemere's Fan

23. In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve. ~ Susan Sontag,

827:queasiness. Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals—that body of psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague boundary between what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not. ~ Susan Sontag,

828:Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation. ~ Susan Sontag,

829:As long as art is understood and valued as an “absolute” activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses. So far as the best art defines itself by essentially “priestly” aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear — and then sent away. ~ Susan Sontag,

830: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

831:Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves-how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one "role" to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I'm supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it's successfully executed. ~ Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh,

832:To us, the difference between the #‎ photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #‎ photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle. ~ Susan Sontag,

833:That tendency of social thought to generalize, to describe a leading tendency in a society in such a way that it seems that everything falls within its iron laws, is very common. Of course our own experience tells us that life is not as monochrome as these thinkers depict it. On the other hand they are very valuable because they alert us to transformations we are likely to take for granted. ~ Susan Sontag,

834:In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art , Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community. ~ Susan Sontag,

835:Reassurances are multiplying in the United States and Western Europe that “the general population” is safe. But “the general population” may be as much a code phrase for whites as it is for heterosexuals. Everyone knows that blacks are getting AIDS in disproportionate numbers, as there is a disproportionate number of blacks in the armed forces and a vastly disproportionate number in prisons. ~ Susan Sontag,

836:The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and assertiveness it may not have had in the original. I think the quality of inaccessibility, the mystery, is important - that whatever matters can't be taken in on just one reading or one seeing. This is certainly a quality of the little of art that lasts. ~ Susan Sontag,

837:True that Benjamin used a communist language in the last years of his life, so he looks different to us now. But that's because he died in 1940. Those last years were the ones in which communist language regained authority--seen as necessary to fight fascism (identified as The Enemy). Had Benjamin lived as long as Adorno he would have become as a-social, as disillusioned with left as Adorno did. ~ Susan Sontag,

838:True that Benjamin used a communist language in the last years of his life, so he looks different to ys now. But that's because he died in 1940. Those last years were the ones in which communist language regained authority--seen as necessary to fight fascism (identified as The Enemy). Had Benjamin lived as long as Adorno he would have become as a-social, as disillusioned with left as Adorno did. ~ Susan Sontag,

839:A six-week trip to China in 1973 convinced me—if I needed convincing—that the autonomy of the aesthetic is something to be protected, and cherished, as indispensable nourishment to intelligence. But a decade-long residence in the 1960s, with its inexorable conversion of moral and political radicalisms into “style,” has convinced me of the perils of over- generalizing the aesthetic view of the world. ~ Susan Sontag,

840:it’s so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way—but not wholly) relieve it. I am infinite—I must never forget it … I want sensuality and sensitivity, both … I was more alive and satisfied with H than I have ever been with anyone else … Let me never deny that … I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments … ~ Susan Sontag,

841: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,

842:The joke is this impersonal possession. It doesn’t have anyone’s signature. It was given to me—but you didn’t make it up; it was in my custody, and I chose to pass it on, keep it going. It isn’t about any of us. It doesn’t describe you or me. It has a life of its own.

It goes off—like a pop, like a laugh, a sneeze; like an orgasm; like a little explosion, an overflow. Its telling says, I am here. ~ Susan Sontag,

843:Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace. And “terrorist” is a more flexible word than “communist.” It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless---since there will always be some terrorism. ~ Susan Sontag,

844:Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. ~ Susan Sontag,

845:But the past is the biggest country of all, and there's a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live. ~ Susan Sontag,

846:It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. ~ Susan Sontag,

847:Uma sociedade torna-se "moderna" quando uma das suas principais atividades é produzir e consumir imagens, quando as imagens, que influenciam extraordinariamente a determinação das nossas exigências para com a realidade e são elas mesmas um substituto cobiçado da experiência autêntica, passam a ser indispensáveis para a saúde da economia, para a estabilidade da política e para a procura da felicidade privada. ~ Susan Sontag,

848:If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there. ~ Susan Sontag,

849:O objetivo dos retratos das famílias burguesas nos séculos XVIII e XIX era confirmar uma imagem ideal do modelo (proclamando o seu estatuto social e embelezando a sua aparência); em função deste propósito, é fácil compreender porque é que as pessoas não sentiam necessidade de ter mais do que um retrato. O que o registo fotográfico confirma é, mais modestamente, que a pessoa existe; por isso eles nunca são demais. ~ Susan Sontag,

850:BEAUTY. The visionary authority of Childs’s work resides, in part, in its lack of rhetoric. Her strict avoidance of cliché, and of anything that would make the work disjunctive, fragmented. The refusal of humor, self-mockery, flirtation with the audience, cult of personality. The distaste for the exhibitionistic: movement calling attention to itself, isolatable “effects.” Beauty as, first of all, an art of refusal. ~ Susan Sontag,

851:Hay algo depredador en la acción de hacer una foto. Fotografiar personas es violarlas, pues se las ve como jamás se ven a sí mismas, se las conoce como nunca pueden conocerse; transforma a las personas en objetos que pueden ser poseídos simbólicamente. Así como la cámara es una sublimación del arma, fotografiar a alguien es cometer un asesinato sublimado, un asesinato blando, digno de una época triste, atemorizada. ~ Susan Sontag,

852:Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness. ~ Susan Sontag,

853:All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings. ~ Susan Sontag,

854:I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things. ~ Susan Sontag,

855:Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities. ~ Susan Sontag,

856:Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary. ~ Susan Sontag,

857: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

858:Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity. ~ Susan Sontag,

859:Quanto mais retrocedemos na história menos nítida é a distinção entre imagens e coisas reais, como observou E.H. Gombrich; nas sociedades primitivas, a coisa e a sua imagem não eram mais do que duas manifestações diferentes, ou seja, fisicamente distintas, da mesma energia ou espírito. A isso se deve a suposta eficácia das imagens para propiciar e controlar presenças de grande poder. Esses poderes, essas presenças estavam presentes nelas. ~ Susan Sontag,

860:The Cavaliere is no democrat. But his chilly heart is not insensitive to a certain idea of justice. Not for him the behavior of his grandfather, of whom it is told that he brained a serving boy while drunk in a tavern near London, and retired without realizing what he had done. The distraught taverner followed him to his room and said, “My lord, do you know that you killed that boy?” Stammered the Cavaliere’s ancestor: “Put him on the bill.” * ~ Susan Sontag,

861:Contempt

The contempt I feel for others—for myself different, less internal than guilt.

It’s not that I think (or have ever thought) I was bad—through and through. I think I’m unattractive, unloveable, because I’m incomplete. It’s not what I am that’s wrong, it’s that I’m not more (responsive, alive, generous, considerate, original, sensitive, brave etc.).

My profoundest experience is of indifference, rather than censure. ~ Susan Sontag,

862:Las enormes fauces de la modernidad han masticado la realidad y escupido todo el revoltijo en forma de imágenes. Según un análisis harto influyente, vivimos en una «sociedad del espectáculo». Toda situación ha de ser convertida en espectáculo a fin de que sea real —es decir, interesante— para nosotros. Las personas mismas anhelan convertirse en imágenes: celebridades. La realidad ha abdicado. Sólo hay representaciones: los medios de comunicación ~ Susan Sontag,

863:Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation. ~ Susan Sontag,

864:Se spariranno i libri, sparirà la storia, e spariranno anche gli esseri umani ... I libri non sono soltanto la somma arbitraria dei nostri sogni, e la nostra memoria. Ci offrono anche un modello di autotrascendenza. C'è chi pensa che la lettura sia soltanto una forma di evasione: un'evasione dal mondo «reale» di tutti i giorni, verso un mondo immaginario, il mondo dei libri. I libri sono molto di più. Sono una maniera per essere pienamente umani. ~ Susan Sontag,

865:It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take 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 ~ Susan Sontag,

866:Bütün fotoğraflar, altlarına eklenen yazılar ya da üstlerine konan başlıklarla açıklanmayı veya çarpıtılmayı beklerler. Son dönemdeki Balkan savaşlarının ilk aşamalarında Sırplarla Hırvatlar savaşırken, bir köyün topa tutulmasıyla öldürülen aynı çocukların fotoğrafları hem Sırpların hem de Hırvatların propaganda dosyaları içinde yer almıştır. Yazısını değiştirirseniz, çocukların ölümü kolaylıkla yeniden ve yeniden kullanılabilme özelliğine sahiptir. ~ Susan Sontag,

867:Son múltiples los usos para las incontables oportunidades que depara la vida moderna de mirar —con distancia, por el medio de la fotografía— el dolor de otras personas. Las fotografías de una atrocidad pueden producir reacciones opuestas. Una llamada a la paz. Un grito de venganza. O simplemente la confundida conciencia, repostada sin pausa de información fotográfica, de que suceden cosas terribles."

Susan Sontag| Ante el dolor de los demás. ~ Susan Sontag,

868:Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy ~ Susan Sontag,

869:There is an understandable vindictiveness in people who come from Communist countries. They want to keep telling us that we were fools to think that we could make radical changes in our society. Though I understand their dismay, respect their suffering and don't understand the gullibility of some people who don't take in how repressive these societies are, I still think it's important to keep people of all kinds as active in civic matters as possible. ~ Susan Sontag,

870:Algo feo o grotesco puede ser conmovedor porque la atención del fotógrafo lo ha dignificado. Algo bello puede ser objeto de sentimientos tristes porque ha envejecido o decaído o ya no existe. Todas las fotografías son memento morí. Hacer una fotografía es participar de la mortalidad, vulnerabilidad, mutabilidad de otra persona o cosa. Precisamente porque seccionan un momento y lo congelan, todas las fotografías atestiguan la despiadada disolución del tiempo. ~ Susan Sontag,

871:As fotografias eram vistas como um modo de dar informação a pessoas que não tinham o hábito da leitura. o Daily News ainda se autodenomina New York's Picture Newspaper, apelando a uma identificação populista. No extremo oposto da escala, o Le Monde, um jornal destinado a leitores preparados, bem informados, não utiliza quaisquer fotografias, pois pressupõe-se que, para os seus leitores, a fotografia só serviria de ilustração para a análise contida num artigo. ~ Susan Sontag,

872:I live in an unethical society that coarsens the sensibilities and thwarts the capacities for goodness of most people but makes available for minority consumption an astonishing array of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. Those who don’t enjoy (in both senses) my pleasures have every right, from their side, to regard my consciousness as spoiled, corrupt, decadent. I, from my side, can’t deny the immense richness of these pleasures, or my addiction to them. ~ Susan Sontag,

873:I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature.
Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated.
I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts.
I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true. ~ Susan Sontag,

874:In one of its aspects, art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention. The history of the arts is tantamount to the discovery & formulation of a repertory of objects on which to lavish attention. (Oscar Wilde pointed out that people didn’t see fogs before certain nineteenth-century poets & painters taught them how to; & surely, no one saw as much of the variety & subtlety of the human face before the era of the movies.) ~ Susan Sontag,

875:That there could be death camps and a siege and civilians slaughtered by the thousands and thrown into mass graves on European soil fifty years after the end of the Second World War gave the war in Bosnia and the Serb campaign of killing in Kosovo their special, anachronistic interest. But one of the main ways of understanding the war crimes committed in southeastern Europe in the 1990s has been to say that the Balkans, after all, were never really part of Europe. ~ Susan Sontag,

876: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

877:İnsanlar gerçeğin, sadece onlar gerçeği dile getirdiği zaman var olduğunu anlayabilselerdi, ona daha çok saygı gösterirlerdi. İzin verin, bununla ne demek istediğimi açıklayayım. Gerçek, bilinen bir şey değil, her zaman söylenen bir şeydir. Konuşma ya da yazışma olmasaydı, herhangi bir şeyle ilgili bir gerçek de var olmazdı. Var olan, sadece görünen bir şey olurdu. Bu yüzden, benim hayatım ve uğraşlarım bence gerçek değildir. Onlar sadece benim hayatım ve uğraşlarım. ~ Susan Sontag,

878:War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon. ~ Susan Sontag,

879: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. ~ Susan Sontag,

880:The myth is tenderly parodied in a 1928 silent film, The Cameraman, which has an inept dreamy Buster Keaton vainly struggling with his dilapidated apparatus, knocking out windows and doors whenever he picks up his tripod, never managing to take one decent picture, yet finally getting some great footage (a photojournalist scoop of a tong war in New York’s Chinatown)—by inadvertence. It is the hero’s pet monkey who loads the camera with film and operates it part of the time. ~ Susan Sontag,

881:This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images. ~ Susan Sontag,

882:Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya's and photographs by the convention that artists "make" drawings and paintings while photographers "take" photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. ~ Susan Sontag,

883:Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it. ~ Susan Sontag,

884:Susan Sontag, one of Rushdie’s most loyal defenders, Daniel Pipes, an American conservative, and, later, Kenan Malik, a British historian of the struggles for free speech, all noticed the dangers of London and Washington’s stance. They were telling Muslim democrats, free-thinkers, feminists and liberals that human rights were Western rights, and not for brown-skinned people from a clashing ‘civilisation’. You can call this cultural relativism, but ‘racism’ is a blunter and better word. ~ Nick Cohen,

885:La fotografía usurpó al pintor en la tarea de suministrar imágenes que transcriban la realidad con precisión. Weston insiste en que, por ello, «el pintor tendría que estar profundamente agradecido», pues como tantos fotógrafos anteriores y posteriores a él considera que la usurpación es en realidad una liberación. Al apropiarse de la tarea de retratar de manera realista, otrora monopolizada por la pintura, la fotografía liberó a la pintura para su gran vocación moderna: la abstracción. ~ Susan Sontag,

886:Tumor angiogenesis exploits the same pathways that are used when blood vessels are created to heal wounds. Nothing is invented; nothing is extraneous. Cancer’s life is a recapitulation of the body’s life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,

887:Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds? ~ Susan Sontag,

888:Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. ~ Susan Sontag,

889: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,

890:Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. ~ Susan Sontag,

891:Still, I know I missed a lot, especially in the beginning, not only because I was an outsider but also because I was constantly overanalyzing things. A buzzing inner monologue would often draw me inward, hindering my ability to remain alert to the heat of life at play right in front of me. It’s safer that way. Our ideas allow us to tame social life, to order it according to typologies and theories. As Susan Sontag has warned, this comfort can “deplete the world” and get in the way of seeing. ~ Matthew Desmond,

892:It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive (...). But whatever you took home from the movies was only part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours - which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen ~ Susan Sontag,

893:It isn’t that I like it and I don’t like it—that’s too simple. Or, if you will, it isn’t “both yes and no.” It’s “this but also that.” I’d love to settle in on a strong feeling or reaction. But, having seen whatever I see, my mind keeps on going and I see something else. It’s that I quickly see the limitations of whatever I say or whatever judgment I make about anything. There’s a wonderful remark of Henry James: “Nothing is my last word on anything.” There’s always more to be said, more to be felt. ~ Susan Sontag,

894:I believe in the soul ... the small of a woman's back, the hanging curveball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. ~ Kevin Costner,

895:We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right. ~ Susan Sontag,

896:To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States-a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history-is exempt. That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful belief in American exceptionalism. ~ Susan Sontag,

897:The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion. ~ Susan Sontag,

898:and they realize it is just the two of them now, when the father has gone and the children are left alone in the funhouse, they stand in silence, the fat lady and the short man with one arm, and try to look only at the mirrors, but a gust of happiness that seems to have no borders, bliss without an edge, envelops them, and exhausted by the stress of desire, hilarious with happiness, they turn toward each other and kiss (and kiss and kiss), and their turn, their kiss, was shattered, multiplied in the mirrors above. ~ Susan Sontag,

899:On Keeping a Journal.

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.

The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it. ~ Susan Sontag,

900:Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness - pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone. ~ Susan Sontag,

901:I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names. Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province. ~ Susan Sontag,

902:(...) escreve Arbus, "foi nunca ter enfrentado qualquer adversidade. Encontrava-me confinada a uma sensação de irrealidade... E, por mais absurdo que pareça, a sensação de imunidade era dolorosa" Sentindo um descontentamento semelhante, West conseguiu, em 1927, um emprego como rececionista noturno num deprimente hotel de Manhattan. A maneira de Arbus procurar experiências e, por isso, adquirir um sentido de realidade, foi a câmera. (...) O interesse de Arbus pelos freaks exprime um desejo de violar a sua própria inocência. ~ Susan Sontag,

903:It has happened. It is over.

They fled. They mourned. Until grief had turned stony, too, and they came back. Awed by the completeness of the erasure, they gazed upon the fattened ground below which their world lay entombed. The ash under their feet, still warm, no longer seared their shoes. It cooled further. Hesitations vaporized. ...most of those who had survived set about rebuilding, reliving; there. Their mountain now had an ugly hole at the top. The forests had been incinerated. But they, too, would grow again. ~ Susan Sontag,

904:Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life.
Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture. ~ Susan Sontag,

905:I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.

Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province. ~ Susan Sontag,

906:Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. ~ Susan Sontag,

907:Two kinds of writers. Those who think this life is all there is, and want to describe everything: the fall, the battle, the accouchement, the horse-race. That is, Tolstoy. And those who think this life is a kind of testing-ground (for what we don’t know — to see how much pleasure + pain we can bear or what pleasure + pain are?) and want to describe only the essentials. That is, Dostoyevsky. The two alternatives. How can one write like T. after D.? The task is to be as good as D. — as serious spiritually, + then go on from there. ~ Susan Sontag,

908:Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross. ~ Susan Sontag,

909:Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent--war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. ~ Susan Sontag,

910:Susan Sontag has made perceptive remarks on the role of the photographed image in our perception of the world. She writes, for instance, of a ‘mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs’,60 and argues that ‘the reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera’,61 and that ‘the omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.’62 ~ Anonymous,

911:One reason that ‘Histoire de l’oeil’ and ‘Madame Edwarda’ make such a strong and unsettling impression is that Bataille understood more clearly than any other writer I know of that what pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death. I am not suggesting that every pornographic work speaks, either overtly or covertly, of death. Only works dealing with that specific and sharpest inflection of the themes of lust, “the obscene,” do. It’s toward the gratifications of death, succeeding and surpassing those of eros, that every truly obscene quest tends. ~ Susan Sontag,

912:We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit, will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down. ~ Susan Sontag,

913:We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down. ~ Susan Sontag,

914:Being in love (l’amour fou) a pathological variant of loving. Being in love = addiction, obsession, exclusion of others, insatiable demand for presence, paralysis of other interests and activities. A disease of love, a fever (therefore exalting). One “falls” in love. But this is one disease which, if one must have it, is better to have often rather than infrequently. It’s less mad to fall in love often (less inaccurate for there are many wonderful people in the world) than only two or three times in one’s life. Or maybe it’s better always to be in love with several people at any given time. ~ Susan Sontag,

915: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,

916:The concern is that the images to be devised won't be sufficiently upsetting: not concrete, not detailed enough. Pity can entail a moral judgement if, as Aristotle maintains, pity is considered to be the emotion that we owe only to those enduring undeserved misfortune. But pity, far from being the natural twin of fear in the dramas of catastrophic misfortune, seems diluted—distracted—by fear, while fear (dread, terror) usually manages to swamp pity. Leonardo is suggesting that the artist's gaze be, literally, pitiless. The image should appall, and in that terribilità lies a challenging kind of beauty. ~ Susan Sontag,

917: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,

918:Like a wind, like a storm, like a fire, like an earthquake, like a mud slide, like a deluge, like a tree falling, a torrent roaring, an ice floe breaking, like a tidal wave, like a shipwreak, like an explosion, like a lid blown off, like a consuming fire, like spreading blight, like a sky darkening, a bridge collapsing, a hole opening. Like a volcano erupting.

Surely more than just the actions of people: choosing, yielding, braving, lying, understanding, being right, being deceived, being consistent, being visionary, being reckless, being cruel, being mistaken, being original, being afraid . . . ~ Susan Sontag,

919: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,

920:I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent. ~ Susan Sontag,

921:We plowed through Chaucer, and I learned to assist her using the Middle English dictionary. One year we spent the winter painstakingly noting each instance of symbolism within Pilgrim’s Progress on separate recipe cards, and I was delighted to see our pile grow to be thicker than the book itself. She set her hair in curlers while listening to records of Carl Sandburg’s poems over and over, and instructed me on how to hear the words differently each time. After discovering Susan Sontag, she explained to me that even meaning itself is a constructed concept, and I learned how to nod and pretend to understand. My ~ Hope Jahren,

922: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,

923:To America—I salute you, especially those parts of you which are not beautiful: your new banks; your candy bars; your parking lots. I have tried always to see the best in you and your people who while friendly and full of fun on the outside are often rather mean on the inside. But no matter. My life has been spent in the discovery of you—that is, of myself. I am what I am because I am a citizen of this country and a votary of its way of life. Therefore, let my body be cremated and my remains scattered among the cigarette ashes next to the potatoes which lie uneaten (because you are dieting) on your dinner plates. ~ Susan Sontag,

924:So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent- if not inappropriate- response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may- in ways we might prefer not to imagine- be linked to their suffering, as the wealth as some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark. ~ Susan Sontag,

925:To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant in time and geography, of a beloved person. Such a death bears a peculiar imprint of doubt. To be told one day that someone has gone off to the other side of the world, and with whom you expect momentarily to be reunited, has actually been dead for many months, during which you have been going on with your life, unaware of this subtraction that has taken place, makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal—which is why we bear to take in so much of it. ~ Susan Sontag,

926:Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not “Apocalypse Now” but “Apocalypse From Now On.” Apocalypse has become an event that is happening and not happening. It may be that some of the most feared events, like those involving the irreparable ruin of the environment, have already happened. But we don’t know it yet, because the standards have changed. Or because we do not have the right indices for measuring the catastrophe. Or simply because this is a catastrophe in slow motion. (Or feels as if it is in slow motion, because we know about it, can anticipate it; and now have to wait for it to happen, to catch up with what we think we know.) Modern ~ Susan Sontag,

927:Maybe it is not the destructiveness of the volcano that pleases most, though everyone loves a conflagration, but its defiance of the law of gravity to which every inorganic mass is subject. What pleases first at the sight of the plant world is its vertical upward direction. That is why we love trees. Perhaps we attend to a volcano for its elevation, like ballet. How high the molten rocks soar, how far above the mushrooming cloud. The thrill is that the mountain blows itself up, even if it must then like the dancer return to earth; even if it does not simply descend—it falls, falls on us. But first it goes up, it flies. Whereas everything pulls, drags down. Down. ~ Susan Sontag,

928:Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. (...) And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities, that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to See more, to Hear more, to Feel more. ~ Susan Sontag,

929:It was a mark of refinement, of sensibility, to be sad. That is, to be powerless. In Stendhal’s Armance, the anxious mother is reassured by the doctor that Octave is not, after all, suffering from tuberculosis but only from that “dissatisfied and critical melancholy characteristic of young people of his generation and position.” Sadness and tuberculosis became synonymous. The Swiss writer Henri Amiel, himself tubercular, wrote in 1852 in his Journal in-time:

Sky draped in gray, pleated by subtle shading, mists trailing on the distant mountains; nature despairing, leaves falling on all sides like the lost illusions of youth under the tears of incurable grief [...] ~ Susan Sontag,

930:...Usted le ofreció a la gente nuevas maneras de imaginar, al tiempo que proclamaba una y otra vez nuestra deuda con el pasado, sobre todo con la literatura. Afirmó que le debemos a la literatura casi todo lo que somos y lo que hemos sido. Si los libros desaparecen, desaparecerá la historia y también los seres humanos. Estoy segura de que tiene razón. Los libros no son sólo la suma arbitraria de nuestros sueños y de nuestra memoria. También nos ofrecen el modelo de la propia trascendencia. Algunos creen que la lectura es sólo una manera de evadirse: una evasión del mundo diario “real” a uno imaginario, al mundo de los libros. Los libros son mucho más. Son una manera de ser del todo humano.... ~ Susan Sontag,

931:I don't intend to let my intellect dominate me, and the last thing I want to do is worship knowledge or people who have knowledge! I don't give a damn for anyone's aggregation of facts, except that it be a reflection [of] basic sensitivity which I do demand... I intend to do everything... to have one way of evaluating experience—does it cause me pleasure or pain and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful—I shall anticipate pleasure everything and find it, too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly... everything matters! The only thing I resign is the power to resign, to retreat: the acceptance of sameness and the intellect. I am alive... I am beautiful... what else is there? ~ Susan Sontag,

932:We do not find among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and the Orientals the same value placed on love because we do not find there the same positive value placed on suffering. Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one’s ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, by one’s ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium. In contrast, the sensibility we have inherited identifies spirituality and seriousness with turbulence, suffering, passion. For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain. Thus it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering. ~ Susan Sontag,

933:Erkeklerin kendilerini erkekliklerini kanıtlamak zorunda hissettiklerini, oysa kadınların kadın sayılmak için kadınsılıklarını doğrulamak zorunda olmadığını hiç fark ettin mi? Bunun neden böyle olduğunu biliyor musun? İzin ver de, bir annenin ve bir kadının bilgeliğiyle bunu sana açıklayayım. Kadın olmak, insanların olması gerektiği gibi, sevgi ve huzur dolu olmaktır (...) oysa erkek olmak doğal olmayan, doğanın asla niyetlenmediği bir işe girişmek demektir. Erkek olma çabası, sürekli bozulan makineyi aşırı derecede zorlar (...) şiddet, cüretkarlık, hilekarlık, erkeğin kendini kanıtlamak için giriştiği bütün bu kibir dolu acınası bahaneler 'erkekçe eylemler' sayılıp değer verilir. Bunlar olmazsa o erkek olamaz. Tabii ki olamaz! ~ Susan Sontag,

934:Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all the time. During these years, kids would live communally – doing some work, anyway being physically active, in the countryside(...)

This simple change in the age specificity of schooling would a) reduce adolescent discontent, anomie, boredom, neurosis; b) radically modify the almost inevitable process by which people at 50 are psychologically and intellectually ossified (...)

After all, since most people from now on are going to live to be 70, 75, 80, why should all their schooling be bunched together in the first 1/3 or 1/4 of their lives – so that it’s downhill all the way ~ Susan Sontag,

935:(Part of the self-definition of Europe and the neo-European countries is that it, the First World, is where major calamities are history-making, transformative, while in poor, African or Asian countries they are part of a cycle, and therefore something like an aspect of nature.) Nor has AIDS become so publicized because, as some have suggested, in rich countries the illness first afflicted a group of people who were all men, almost all white, many of them educated, articulate, and knowledgeable about how to lobby and organize for public attention and resources devoted to the disease. AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them. What ~ Susan Sontag,

936:If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far.... The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself ~ Susan Sontag,

937:The hunt for more dramatic (as they’re often described) images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value. “Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be,” proclaimed André Breton. He called this aesthetic ideal “surrealist,” but in a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values, to ask the images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism as well as good business sense. How else to get attention for one’s product or one’s art? How else to make a dent when there is incessant exposure to images, and overexposure to a handful of images seen again and again? The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence. ~ Susan Sontag,

938:Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibited, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... ~ Susan Sontag,

939: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,

940:That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action. ~ Susan Sontag,

941:(The new model of rule, which revoked whatever legitimate claim women had to governance, was the assembly—composed only of men, since it derived its legitimacy from a hypothetical contract among equals. Women, defined as neither fully rational nor free, could not be a party to this contract.) They were a family—a family that had gone wrong, in which the influence of a woman had become predominant. Part of the scandal of their misdeeds was that a woman played so visible a role in them. It became another household drama of the old regime, featuring a powerful woman—that is, a woman exercising inappropriate power—who, having ventured out of the sphere appropriate to women (children, domestic duties, some talented dabbling in the arts), had become power-hungry, depraved, and through her sexual wiles had enslaved a weak male and corrupted a righteous one. * ~ Susan Sontag,

942:the earliest surreal photographs come from the 1850s, when photographers first went out prowling the streets of London, Paris, and New York, looking for their unposed slice of life. These photographs, concrete, particular, anecdotal (except that the anecdote has been effaced)—moments of lost time, of vanished customs—seem far more surreal to us now than any photograph rendered abstract and poetic by superimposition, under-printing, solarization, and the like. Believing that the images they sought came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as loyal Freudians to be timeless as well as universal, the Surrealists misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious—time itself. What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class. ~ Susan Sontag,

943:Someone who accepts that in the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war—except to those form whom the notions of valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility. The destructiveness of war—short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide—is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong—wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force" (1940), violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or hero. ~ Susan Sontag,

944:Hastalıkta hayal gücü her şeydir. Ona gerektiği gibi başvurulduğunda iyileştirir, ama hayal gücü insanı öldürür de. Bedenin hayal gücüyde sıkıcıdır, hatta her şeyi oldukları haliyle kavrar. Rüyalar hayal gücünün şiiri, hastalık ve düzyazısıdır. Hiç durmadan konuşan bir tanışım, kulakta başlayan bir rahatsızlıktan öldü; büyük el kol hareketleri yapmayı çok seven bir avukat da felç geçirdi. Hastalıkların da modası var. Bizimkilerden daha basit toplumlarda hastalığın da her şey gibi toplumsal ve ortak bir niteliği vardır: En tipik hastalık türü salgınlardır. Bizim toplumumuzda hastalık kişiye özel bir sorundur; modern hastalıklar bulaşıcı değildir. Hastalık her insana tek başına saldırır. Ya ihmal ettiği yahut da aşırı bir şekilde geliştirdiği bir organ kişiye özel olarak seçilir. Bu artık kirlilik değil, bireysel bir yargıdır. Başkasına geçirilemeyeceği için ona daha büyük bir uysallıkla katlanılır. ~ Susan Sontag,

945:One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits. Appetite is supposed to be immoderate. The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty—of the indefinite expansion of possibility. Virtually every kind of advocacy claims to offer first of all or also some increment of freedom. Not every freedom, to be sure. In rich countries, freedom has come to be identified more and more with “personal fulfillment”—a freedom enjoyed or practiced alone (or as alone). Hence much of recent discourse about the body, reimagined as the instrument with which to enact, increasingly, various programs of self-improvement, of the heightening of powers. ~ Susan Sontag,

946:A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetise the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs as strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images. ~ Susan Sontag,

947:Au grand jour, à voix haute, il dit comme Susan Sontag, qui a écrit là-dessus un essai beau et digne, La Maladie comme métaphore : l'explication psychique du cancer est à la fois un mythe sans fondement scientifique et une vilenie morale, parce qu'elle culpabilise les malades. Cela, c'est la thèse officielle, la ligne du Parti. Dans le noir, en revanche, il dit ce que disent Fritz Zorn ou Pierre Cazenave : que son cancer n'était pas un agresseur étranger mais une partie de lui, un ennemi intime et peut-être même pas un ennemi. La première façon de penser est rationnelle, la seconde est magique. On peut soutenir que devenir adulte, à quoi est supposé aider la psychanalyse, c'est abandonner la pensée magique pour la pensée rationnelle, mais on peut soutenir aussi qu'il ne faut rien abandonner, que ce qui est vrai à un étage de l'esprit ne l'est pas à l'autre et qu'il faut habiter tous les étages, de la cave au grenier. J'ai l'impression que c'est ce que fait Étienne. ~ Emmanuel Carr re,

948:Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us—grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P ~ Susan Sontag,

949:Temporarily then, for a short time only, they were to live in Palermo: the south of south. Every culture has its southerners—people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives—envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibited, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do. Every country, including southern countries, has its south: below the equator, it lies north. Hanoi has Saigon, Sao Paulo has Rio, Delhi has Calcutta, Rome has Naples, and Naples, which to those at the top of this peninsula ~ Susan Sontag,

950:But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger. ~ Susan Sontag,

951:Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the ... jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you. ~ Susan Sontag,

952:Studs Terkel was waiting for a number 146 bus alongside two well-groomed business types. "This was before the term yuppie was used," he explains. "But that was what they were. He was in Brooks Brothers and Gucci shoes and carrying the Wall Street Journal under his arm. She was a looker. I mean stunning - Bloomingdales and Neiman Marcus and carrying Vanity Fair."

Terkel, who is 95, has long been a Chicago icon, every bit as accessible and integral to the cultural life of the Windy City as Susan Sontag was to New York. He had shared the bus stop with this couple for several mornings but they had always failed to acknowledge him. "It hurts my ego," he quips. "But this morning the bus was late and I thought, this is my chance." The rest of the story is his.

"I say, 'Labour Day is coming up.' Well, it was the wrong thing to say. He looks toward me with a look of such contempt it's like Noel Coward has just spotted a bug on his collar. He says, 'We despise unions.' I thought, oooooh. The bus is still late. I've got a winner here. Suddenly I'm the ancient mariner and I fix him with my glittering eye. 'How many hours a day do you work?' I ask. He says, 'Eight.' 'How comes you don't work 18 hours a day like your great-great-grandfather did? You know why? Because four guys got hanged in Chicago in 1886 fighting for the eight-hour day ... For you. ~ Gary Younge,

953:Women do not simply have faces, as men do; they are identified with their faces. Men have a naturalistic relation to their faces. Certainly they care whether they are good-looking or not. They suffer over acne, protruding ears, tiny eyes; they hate getting bald. But there is a much wider latitude in what is esthetically acceptable in a man’s face than what is in a woman’s. A man’s face is defined as something he basically doesn’t need to tamper with; all he has to do is keep it clean. He can avail himself of the options for ornament supplied by nature: a beard, a mustache, longer or shorter hair. But he is not supposed to disguise himself. What he is “really” like is supposed to show. A man lives through his face; it records the progressive stages of his life. And since he doesn’t tamper with his face, it is not separate from but is completed by his body – which is judged attractive by the impression it gives of virility and energy. By contrast, a woman’s face is potentially separate from her body. She does not treat it naturalistically. A woman’s face is the canvas upon which she paints a revised, corrected portrait of herself. One of the rules of this creation is that the face not show what she doesn’t want it to show. Her face is an emblem, an icon, a flag. How she arranges her hair, the type of make-up she uses, the quality of her complexion – all these are signs, not of what she is “really” like, but of how she asks to be treated by others, especially men. They establish her status as an “object. ~ Susan Sontag,

954:Consumption was understood as a manner of appearing, and that appearance became a staple of nineteenth-century manners. It became rude to eat heartily. It was glamorous to look sickly. “Chopin was tubercular at a time when good health was not chic,” Camille Saint-Saëns wrote in 1913. “It was fashionable to be pale and drained; Princess Belgiojoso strolled along the boulevards … pale as death in person.” Saint-Saëns was right to connect an artist, Chopin, with the most celebrated femme fatale of the period, who did a great deal to popularize the tubercular look. The TB-influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks—at a moment when aristocracy stops being a matter of power, and starts being mainly a matter of image. (“One can never be too rich. One can never be too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor once said.) Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The tubercular look had to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding. “I cough continually!” Marie Bashkirtsev wrote in the once widely read Journal, which was published, after her death at twenty-four, in 1887. “But for a wonder, far from making me look ugly, this gives me an air of languor that is very becoming.” What was once the fashion for aristocratic femmes fatales and aspiring young artists became, eventually, the province of fashion as such. 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,

955:intellectual imperialism. It has been, and still is, used to denigrate the orientation that many people still experience, that the world, and the other organisms with which we share this Earth, are alive, intelligent, and aware. It has been used to stifle the response of the heart to what has been presented to the senses. This has resulted in the creation of a conceptual monoculture that can’t see outside its limitations. Such imperialists have set out to conquer the superstitious natives inhabiting the dark continent, the place where the general populace lives. Midgley makes the point that arguments such as Day’s rest in a belief in human beings as “an isolated will, guided by an intelligence, arbitrarily connected to a rather unsatisfactory array of feelings, and lodged, by chance, in an equally unsatisfactory human body.”18 Or as Susan Sontag once described it: “consciousness harnessed to flesh,”19 as if there could be consciousness without the emergence of the self-organized system we call the body. This type of dissociation is a common side effect of the materialist and very reductionist view of the world most of us are trained in. But as Midgely notes, this system of thought is not reason, not science, but behavioral examples of, as she puts it, an unexamined, “exuberant power fantasy.” It is bad software, generated out of unexamined psychological frameworks. The evolutionary escalator metaphor and the assumptions of what constitutes intelligence (and value) that are embedded within it create, automatically, behavior that is very dangerous to every other life-form on this planet—in fact to the health of every ecosystem this planet possesses. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,

956:Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966)...For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair. ~ Susan Sontag,

957:You are a passenger. We are all, often, passengers. The boat, history, is going somewhere. You are not the captain. But you have excellent accommodations. Of course, down there in the hold are famished immigrants or enslaved Africans or press-ganged tars. You can’t help them—you do feel sorry for them—and you can’t control the captain, either. Cosseted though you may be, you are actually quite powerless. A gesture on your part might relieve your bad conscience, if you have a bad conscience, but would not materially improve their situation. How would it help them to give up your own spacious cabin, with the room you require for your copious belongings, since, although those below have very few belongings, there are so many of them? The food you are eating would never be enough to feed all of them; indeed, if prepared with them in mind as well, it would no longer be as refined; and of course the view would be spoiled (crowds spoil a view, crowds litter, etc.). So you have no choice but to enjoy the excellent food and the view. Nevertheless, assuming you are not indifferent, you think a lot about what is going on. Even if it is not your responsibility, how can it be your responsibility, you are still a participant and a witness. (First- or second-class passengers, these are the points of view from which most accounts of history are written.) And if those being persecuted are those who might have had accommodations as agreeable as your own, people of your own rank or who have your interests, you are far less likely to be indifferent to their present distress. Of course, you cannot prevent them from being punished if they are in fact guilty. But, assuming you are not indifferent, that you are a decent person, you will try to intervene when you can. Counsel leniency. Or at least prudence. The ~ Susan Sontag,

958:Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the “realistic” view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment. Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness—that of the seemliness of religious symbols—had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to “modern” demands. Thus, the Stoics, to accord with their view that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics. What Homer really designated by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance. Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian “spiritual” interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there. ~ Susan Sontag,

959:Diddy, not really alive, had a life. Hardly the same. Some people are their lives. Others, like Diddy, merely inhabit their lives. Like insecure tenants, never knowing exactly the extent of their property or when the lease will expire. Like unskilled cartographers, drawing and redrawing erroneous maps of an exotic continent.
Eventually, for such a person, everything is bound to run dow. The walls sag. Empty spaces bulge between objects. The surfaces of objects sweat, thin out, buckle. The hysterical fluids of fear deposited at the core of objects ooze out along the seams. Deploying things and navigating through space becomes laborious. Too much effort to amble from kitchen to living room, serving drinks, turning on the hi-fi, pretending to be cheerful . . .
Everything running down: suffusing the whole of Diddy's well-tended life. Like a house powered by one large generator in the basement. Diddy has an almost palpable sense of the decline of the generator's energy. Or, of the monstrous malfunctioning of that generator, gone amok. Sending forth a torrent of refuse that climbs up into Diddy's life, cluttering all his floor space and overwhelming his pleasant furnishings, so that he's forced to take refuge. Huddle in a narrow corner. But however small the space Diddy means to keep free for himself, it won't remain safe. If solid material can't invade it, then the offensive discharge of the failing or rebellious generator will liquefy; so that it can travel everywhere, spread like a skin. The generator will spew forth a stream of crude oil, grimy and malodorous, that coats all things and persons and objects, the vulgar as well as the precious, the ugly as well as what little still remains beautiful. Befouling Diddy's world and rendering it unusable. Uninhabitable.
This deliquescent running-down of everything becomes coexistent with Diddy's entire span of consciousness, undermines his most minimal acts. Getting out of bed is an agony unpromising as the struggles of a fish cast up on the beach, trying to extract life from the meaningless air. Persons who merely have a life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing. But when this fluid evaporates, an uncensored, fetid, appalling underlife is disclosed. Lost continents are brought to view, bearing the ruins of doomed cities, the sparsely fleshed skeletons of ancient creatures immobilized in their death throes, a landscape of unparalleled savagery. ~ Susan Sontag,

960:Needless to say, what whites now think and say about race has undergone a revolution. In fact, it would be hard to find other opinions broadly held by Americans that have changed so radically. What whites are now expected to think about race can be summarized as follows: Race is an insignificant matter and not a valid criterion for any purpose—except perhaps for redressing wrongs done to non-whites. The races are equal in every respect and are therefore interchangeable. It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States. These are matters on which there is little ground for disagreement; anyone who holds differing views is not merely mistaken but morally suspect.
By these standards, of course, most of the great men of America’s past are morally suspect, and many Americans are embarrassed to discover what our traditional heroes actually said. Some people deliberately conceal this part of our history. For example, the Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.”
The Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1942. A more contemporary approach to the past is to bring out all the facts and then repudiate historical figures. This is what author Conor Cruise O’Brien did in a 1996 cover story for The Atlantic Monthly. After detailing Jefferson’s views, he concluded:
“It follows that there can be no room for a cult of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of an effectively multiracial America . . . . Once the facts are known, Jefferson is of necessity abhorrent to people who would not be in America at all if he could have had his way.”
Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial “stone by stone.”
It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washington owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history.
This, in effect, is what some people wish to do. American colonists and Victorian Englishmen saw the expansion of their race as an inspiring triumph. Now it is cause for shame. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote Susan Sontag.
The wealth of America used to be attributed to courage, hard work, and even divine providence. Now, it is common to describe it as stolen property. Robin Morgan, a former child actor and feminist, has written, “My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony. ~ Jared Taylor,

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