Susan Sontag quotes - page 9

The end of the world. This is not the end of the world. (Susan Sontag)
The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent - the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" - the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything. View quote
Susan Sontag
Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. View quote
Susan Sontag
I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
Elites presuppose masses. View quote
Susan Sontag
Styles change, style doesn't. View quote
Susan Sontag
Evans wanted his photographs to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent." The moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely creditable today. Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent. View quote
Susan Sontag
Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing. (Susan Sontag)
I don't feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my lonliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall, like seeking love in a whorehouse. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. (Susan Sontag)
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won't come through. View quote
Susan Sontag
Perversity is the muse of modern literature. View quote
Susan Sontag