Top 542 Quotes & Sayings by Susan Sontag - Page 2

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

Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

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

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

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.

Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

Love dies because its birth was an error.

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.

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

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.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

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.

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.

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

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

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

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.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

Art is a form of consciousness.

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.

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.

The only interesting ideas are heresies

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

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

My library is an archive of longings.

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.

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

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.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art

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.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

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.

whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.

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

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

How boring just to be a body.

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.

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

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

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.

All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

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