Susan Sontag Quotes

When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

Communism is fascism with a human face.

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.

My ignorance is not charming.

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.

I love to read the way people love to watch television.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.

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.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

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.

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.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

To the militant, identity is everything.

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.

Ideas disturb the levelness of life

With more people, there are more voices to tune out.

Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

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

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.