Susan Sontag Quotes

No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

نویسندگان بزرگ یا شوهرند یا معشوق. برخی نویسندگان فضایل استوار یک شوهر را به ما عرضه می‌کنند: قابل اتکا، فهیم، سخی، برازنده. در سوی دیگر نویسندگانی قرار دارند که در آن‌ها قابلیت‌های یک معشوق را ستایش می‌کنیم، قابلیت‌هایی که از طبیعت و مزاج برمی‌آیند تا فضیلت اخلاقی. زن‌ها به شکلی عجیب ویژگی‌هایی چون بی‌ثباتی، خودخواهی، غیرقابل‌اتکا بودن، و خشونت را که در مورد شوهر هرگز با آن‌ها کنار نمی‌آیند در معشوق خود می‌پذیرند، به شرط آن‌که در عوض نوعی هیجان و فوران احساسی شدید را تجربه کنند. به همین سیاق، خوانندگان نیز با فهم‌ناپذیری، وسواسی بودن، حقایق دردناک، دروغ، یا دستور زبان بد کنار می‌آیند-اگر در عوض نویسنده امکان چشیدن عواطفی کمیاب و احساساتی خطرناک را در اختیارشان قرار دهد. و همان‌طور که در زندگی وجود شوهر و معشوق هر دو ضروری است، در هنر نیز چنین است. باعث تاسف است که ناگزیر باشیم میان آن‌ها دست به انتخاب بزنیم
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Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

However painful they were, I needed my dreams — the metaphor for my introspection — if I was ever to be at peace.

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images — one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.

For Cioran the aphoristic style is less a principle of reality than a principle of knowing: that it’s the destiny of every profound idea to be quickly checkmated by another idea, which it itself has implicitly generated.

Like a wind, like a storm, like a fire, like an earthquake, like a mud slide, like a deluge, like a tree falling, a torrent roaring, an ice floe breaking, like a tidal wave, like a shipwreak, like an explosion, like a lid blown off, like a consuming fire, like spreading blight, like a sky darkening, a bridge collapsing, a hole opening. Like a volcano erupting.

Surely more than just the actions of people: choosing, yielding, braving, lying, understanding, being right, being deceived, being consistent, being visionary, being reckless, being cruel, being mistaken, being original, being afraid . . .

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one — or both. Usually both.

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

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if we could not forget ourselves, at least some of the time? Who would we be if we could not learn? Forgive? Become something other than we are?

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.