Susan Sontag Quotes

In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.

Everyone else not real-very distant, small figures. I would have to swim a thousand miles to reach the margin of the relationship, on the other side of which might lie other people, and it was too far, I was too tired.
The almost infinitely extending network of that relationship; its dense weave That's what held me-

But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.

Regenerative experiences: Plunge into the sea. The sun. An old city. Silence.

For Valéry, the nature of beauty is that it cannot be defined; beauty is precisely “the ineffable.

Not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies — especially when their populations are moved to revolt — but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.

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.

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

I am sick of having opinions. I am sick of talking.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

La sabiduría esencial de la imagen fotográfica afirma: «Ésa es la superficie. Ahora piensen — o más bien sientan, intuyan — qué hay más allá, cómo debe de ser la realidad si ésta es su apariencia».