Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 6

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• One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.

  Susan Sontag

  People, Society, Liberty

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.117, Penguin UK

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• Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.

  Susan Sontag

  Regret, Destiny, Men

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• Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

  Susan Sontag

  Dream, Memories, Book

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• Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

  Susan Sontag

  Two, Creative, Culture

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.177, Macmillan

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• I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

  Susan Sontag

  Waiting, Solitude, Want

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.305, Macmillan

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• A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Photograph

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• No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

  Susan Sontag

  Pain, Taken, People

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.7, Macmillan

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

  Susan Sontag

  World, Has Beens, Ifs

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• I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.

  Susan Sontag

  Truth, Lying, Party

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.317, Macmillan

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• I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

  Susan Sontag

  Dream, Follow Your Dreams

  Christine Allison, Susan Sontag (1978). “The benefactor: a novel”, Delta

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• Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.

  Susan Sontag

  Beautiful, Appreciation, Interesting

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.25, Macmillan

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• Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.

  Susan Sontag

  Wall, Book, Emotional

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.94, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

  Susan Sontag

  Fear, Disease, Sexuality

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• In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Needs, Hermeneutics

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.157, Macmillan

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• Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

  Susan Sontag

  Reality, Citizens, Pollution

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.24, Macmillan

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• 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

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• It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

  Susan Sontag

  Mind, Body, Crowds

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• taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

  Susan Sontag

  Ideas, People, Taste

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• Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

  Susan Sontag

  Silence, Speech, Form

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

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• Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

  Susan Sontag

  Guilt, Innocence, Logic

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.71, Penguin UK

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• An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

  Susan Sontag

  Jobs, Important, Savages

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• Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

  Susan Sontag

  Dream, Witty, World

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.46, Macmillan

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• Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

  Susan Sontag

  People, Mad, This Society

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.340, Macmillan

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• The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

  Susan Sontag

  Cities, Empathy, Joy

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.50, Macmillan

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• The white race is the cancer of human history.

  Susan Sontag

  Cancer, Race, White

  "What's Happening in America" (1966)

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