Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.”

— Susan Sontag

202. “The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty – of the indefinite expansion of possibility.”

— Susan Sontag

203. “To photograph is to confer importance.”

— Susan Sontag

204. “Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.”

— Susan Sontag

205. “The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.”

— Susan Sontag

206. “Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements – land and water, firepower and distancing air.”

— Susan Sontag

207. “Desire has no history...”

— Susan Sontag

208. “Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it.”

— Susan Sontag

209. “Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.”

— Susan Sontag

210. “Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.”

— Susan Sontag

211. “My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.”

— Susan Sontag

212. “Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.”

— Susan Sontag

213. “In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

— Susan Sontag

214. “But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.”

— Susan Sontag

215. “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”

— Susan Sontag

216. “Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.”

— Susan Sontag

217. “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

218. “What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one’s existence as a sexual being – while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up.”

— Susan Sontag

219. “Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.”

— Susan Sontag

220. “All struggle, all resistance is – must be – concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.”

— Susan Sontag

221. “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter.”

— Susan Sontag

222. “The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.”

— Susan Sontag

223. “All memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.”

— Susan Sontag

224. “Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.”

— Susan Sontag

225. “All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.”

— Susan Sontag

226. “The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.”

— Susan Sontag

227. “Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.”

— Susan Sontag

228. “The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure – though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.”

— Susan Sontag

229. “Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.”

— Susan Sontag

230. “My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.”

— Susan Sontag

231. “Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don’t live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.”

— Susan Sontag

232. “The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”

— Susan Sontag

233. “It is passivity that dulls feeling.”

— Susan Sontag

234. “A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way.”

— Susan Sontag

235. “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

236. “Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.”

— Susan Sontag

237. “As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.”

— Susan Sontag

238. “God, living is enormous!”

— Susan Sontag

239. “To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.”

— Susan Sontag

240. “I vulgarize my feelings by speaking of them too readily to others.”

— Susan Sontag

241. “Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.”

— Susan Sontag

242. “To photograph people is to violate them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”

— Susan Sontag

243. “False values begin with the worship of things.”

— Susan Sontag

244. “Perversity is the muse of modern literature.”

— Susan Sontag

245. “Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.”

— Susan Sontag

246. “The “Art Nouveau” appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. “I’m alive.” “I’m decorative.”

— Susan Sontag

247. “Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.”

— Susan Sontag

248. “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.”

— Susan Sontag

249. “Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.”

— Susan Sontag

250. “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”

— Susan Sontag