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
“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
His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for… — 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
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
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
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
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 can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier,… — 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
“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
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. — 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
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 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
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
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
“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
“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
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
