Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 13

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• Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.

  Susan Sontag

  Perfection, Looks, Magazines

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

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

  Susan Sontag

  Barbarians, Persons

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.92, Macmillan

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• Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.

  Susan Sontag

  Independent, Dumb, Secret

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• Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

  Susan Sontag

  Lying, Reality, America

  Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

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• She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.

  Susan Sontag

  Morning, Lying, Sleep

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.171, Macmillan

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• The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.

  Susan Sontag

  Spiritual, Art, Player

  "Styles of Radical Will" by Susan Sontag, (p. 45), 1966.

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• A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Travel, Experience

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

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• Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Mean, Criticism

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

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• Art is seduction, not rape.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Seduction, Art Is

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

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• I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

  Susan Sontag

  Education, Silly, Book

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• The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

  Susan Sontag

  Serious, Relation, Camps

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• People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.

  Susan Sontag

  People, Cynical, Failing

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.17, Univ of California Press

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• Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

  Susan Sontag

  Two, Long, Shadow

  Susan Sontag (2014). “On Photography”, p.105, Penguin UK

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• To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.

  Susan Sontag

  Reading, Frustration, World

  Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

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• 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.

  Susan Sontag

  Despair, Littles, Expect Nothing

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.189, Macmillan

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• In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

  Susan Sontag

  Long, Important, United States

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.256, Macmillan

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• Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

  Susan Sontag

  Believe, Health, Reality

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

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• Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.

  Susan Sontag

  Religious, Talking, Imagination

  "Styles of Radical Will" by Susan Sontag, (p. 69), 1966.

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• When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, People, Chinese

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.99, Macmillan

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• AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

  Susan Sontag

  Taken, Population, Awareness

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• One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.

  Susan Sontag

  People, May, Energy

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• Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

  Susan Sontag

  Psychics, Fiction, Literature

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• My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.

  Susan Sontag

  Religious, Views, Speaks French

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• 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

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• The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Real, Mean

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

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