“Alone, alone. I am alone – I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future)… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“But the past is the biggest country of all, and there's a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country; it… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
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… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It's so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way - but not… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
“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… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
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… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
