Time 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

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

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

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

— Susan Sontag

Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate…

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

“Alone, alone. I am alone – I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems,…

— Susan Sontag

The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the…

— Susan Sontag

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

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

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

— Susan Sontag

“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if…

— 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

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an…

— Susan Sontag

“Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if…

— Susan Sontag

“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

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of…

— Susan Sontag

Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in…

— Susan Sontag

“To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death,…

— Susan Sontag

Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge…

— Susan Sontag

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something…

— Susan Sontag

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects…

— Susan Sontag

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

“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

“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of…

— 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

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

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country; it…

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

“Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present…

— Susan Sontag

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph…

— Susan Sontag

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any…

— 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 take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it,…

— Susan Sontag

His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for…

— 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 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

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they…

— Susan Sontag