Home > Author > Susan Sontag
1 " 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 , The Benefactor
2 " That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life. "
― Susan Sontag
3 " The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both. "
4 " Writing is a mysterious activity. "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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. "
7 " 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. "
8 " Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind. "
― Susan Sontag , Styles of Radical Will
9 " 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. "
10 " Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. "
11 " My library is an archive of longings. "
― Susan Sontag , As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
12 " Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. "
13 " 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 , Regarding the Pain of Others
14 " 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.) "
15 " Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. "
16 " Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. "
17 " It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's. "
18 " 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. "
19 " 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. "
20 " 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. "
