Past Quotes by Susan Sontag

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see…

— Susan Sontag

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

— Susan Sontag

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

— Susan Sontag

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

— Susan Sontag

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

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space…

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked…

— Susan Sontag

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can…

— Susan Sontag

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

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the…

— Susan Sontag

The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future)…

— Susan Sontag

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years…

— Susan Sontag

“We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life…

— Susan Sontag

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

“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

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people,…

— Susan Sontag

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

— Susan Sontag