Susan Sontag Quotes About Past

Quotes about: Past

• To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Past, Years

  "Susan Sontag Finds Romance". Interview with Leslie Garis, www.nytimes.com. August 2, 1992.

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

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Past, America

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.61, Macmillan

• The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

  Susan Sontag

  Beauty, Time, Past

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.69, Macmillan

• It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

  Susan Sontag

  Memories, Past, Touching

• Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

  Susan Sontag

  Passion, Past, Photographer

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.70, Macmillan

• Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

  Susan Sontag

  Past, Reality, Way

  "A Susan Sontag Reader".

• As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

  Susan Sontag

  Insecure, Past, Space

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.10, Macmillan

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

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Travel, Home

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.11, 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

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

  Susan Sontag

  Past, Quality, Photograph

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.22, Macmillan

• Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

  Susan Sontag

  Country, Giving Up, Past

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.11, Macmillan

• The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.

  Susan Sontag

  Sex, Past, Ignored

• art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Past, Would Be

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

  Susan Sontag

  Past, Flux, Existence

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

  Susan Sontag

  Unrequited Love, Past, Devotion

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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