Susan Sontag Quotes About Feelings

Quotes about: Feelings

• One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

  Susan Sontag

  Feelings, Asks

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.27, Macmillan

• Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

  Susan Sontag

  Compassion, Bored, Cynical

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.101, Macmillan

• The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Writing, Feelings

• Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.

  Susan Sontag

  Strong, Feelings, Creation

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.83, Macmillan

• Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Real, Knowing

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.146, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Feelings, Cameras

  Susan Sontag (1978). “On photography”, Delta

• Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

  Susan Sontag

  Names, Feelings, Want

• People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.

  Susan Sontag

  Frustration, Emotional, People

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.102, Macmillan

• It is passivity that dulls feeling.

  Susan Sontag

  Feelings, Passivity

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.102, Macmillan

• In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

  Susan Sontag

  Spiritual, Insanity, Feelings

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

• Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.

  Susan Sontag

  Successful, Self, Feelings

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.152, Macmillan

• [On marriage:] It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.

  Susan Sontag

  Feelings, Institutions, Committed

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.83, Macmillan

• A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past-are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic
  feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

  Susan Sontag

  Distance, Past, Fire

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.17, Macmillan

• I can't say I know how to change the society, but I share the feeling that this society is full of technology which depersonalizes people, which seems to drain a sense of reality from our lives. It's full of a lot of other things too.

  Susan Sontag

  Technology, Reality, People

  Source: ctheory.net

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