Susan Sontag Quotes

According to an old rule of psychic contagion: that absence of clarity or outright confusion in one, just one specific, local matter will end by infecting the whole of one's judgment.

My loyalty to the past — my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most.

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

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.

Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves — how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one “role” to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I’m supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it’s successfully executed.

Most people will not question the rationalizations offered by their government for starting or continuing a war.

در زمانه‌ای زندگی می‌کنیم که تراژدی یک فرم هنری نیست، بلکه شکلی از تاریخ است. نمایش‌نامه‌نویسان دیگر تراژدی نمی‌نویسند. اما آثار هنری‌ای داریم (که هماره به این نام خوانده نمی‌شوند) که تراژدی‌های تاریخی بزرگ زمانه‌ی ما را بازتاب می‌دهند یا در صدد حل آن برمی‌آیند
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از آن‌جا که رخداد تراژیک اعلای دوران ما کشتار شش میلیون یهودی اروپایی است، یکی از جالب‌ترین و تاثیرگذارترین آثار هنری ده سال گذشته محاکمه‌ی آدولف آیشمان در سال 1961 بود
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همان‌طور که هانا آرنت و دیگران اشاره کرده‌اند، اگر بخواهیم دقیقا بر مبنای ملاحظات حقوقی سخن بگوییم، مبنای حقوقی محاکمه‌ی آیشمان، مربوطیت تمامی شواهد ارایه شده و مشروعیت برخی از روندهای به کار رفته، می‌توانند محل سوال باشند. اما حقیقت آن است که محاکمه‌ی آیشمان نه تنها با معیارهای حقوقی محض سازگاری نداشت، بلکه نمی‌توانست چنین باشد. او در نقشی دوگانه ظاهر می‌شد: به عنوان خاص و عام، به عنوان مردی سرشار از گناهی مشخص و مهیب، و به عنوان یک رمز یا نشانه که کل تاریخ ضدسامی‌گری را که با این شهادت غیرقابل‌تصور به نقطه‌ی اوج خود رسید نمایندگی می‌کرد
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به این ترتیب این محاکمه موقعیتی برای تلاش در جهت فهم‌پذیر کردن امر فهم‌ناپذیر به شمار می‌آمد. به این منظور، در حالی که آیشمان خونسرد با عینک روی چشمانش درون قفس شیشه‌ای ضدگلوله‌اش نشسته بود- با لبان فروبسته، و با این همه شبیه یکی از مخلوقات در حال فریاد و با این حال مسکوت نقاشی‌های فرانسیس بیکن- نوعی سوگواری دسته‌جمعی عظیم در صحن دادگاه به اجرا درآمد. انبوهی از واقعیت‌ها در مورد امحا یهودیان روی هم تلنبار شد؛ فریاد عظیم رنجی تاریخی ثبت و پیاده شد. کارکرد این محاکمه همانند کارکرد نمایش‌های تراژیک بود: فراتر و برتر از حکم و مجازات؛ نوعی پالایش یا کاتارسیس
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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.

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.

Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. That illness can be not an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more convincingly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation.

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.

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. With him I have neither, neither privacy or passion. Neither the heightening of self which is won by privacy and loneliness, nor the splendid heroic beautiful loss of self that accompanies passion.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.