Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 17

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

  Susan Sontag

  Dumb, World, Feels

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.177, Macmillan

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• Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

  Susan Sontag

  Real, Book, Ideas

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

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• With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

  Susan Sontag

  Cancer, Moving, Passion

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

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• Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Criticism, Dubious

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

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• The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.

  Susan Sontag

  Cutting, Ideas, Creative

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

  Susan Sontag

  Reality, Cameras, Seems

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.500, Macmillan

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• Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

  Susan Sontag

  Photograph, Shock, Novel

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.20, Macmillan

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• It is passivity that dulls feeling.

  Susan Sontag

  Feelings, Passivity

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

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• Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Photograph, Ugliness

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.76, Macmillan

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• Taste has no system and no proofs.

  Susan Sontag

  Taste, Proof

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.160, Macmillan

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• Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

  Susan Sontag

  School, Assessment, Judging

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.135, Macmillan

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• Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.

  Susan Sontag

  Justice, Diversity, Important

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• 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

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• Literature usually begets literature.

  Susan Sontag

  Literature, Begets

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, p.72, Penguin UK

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• Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.

  Susan Sontag

  Life, Moving, Able

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• [T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Issues, Political

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• To us, the difference between the #‎ photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #‎ photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Mean

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.152, Macmillan

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• The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

  Susan Sontag

  Party, Reality, Self

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.142, Macmillan

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• Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.

  Susan Sontag

  Everyday, Able, May

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

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• I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.

  Susan Sontag

  Writing, Thinking, People

  "The risk taker". Interview with Gary Younge, www.theguardian.com. January 19, 2002.

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• In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art , Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community.

  Susan Sontag

  Spiritual, Art, Perfection

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

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• The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Ideas, Nuisance

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• We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

  Susan Sontag

  Views, Intelligence, Culture

  Salmagundi, No. 31-32, (p. 29), 1975.

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• When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.

  Susan Sontag

  Ambition, Artist, Mediocrity

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• My ignorance is not charming.

  Susan Sontag

  Ignorance, Charming

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