Susan Sontag Quotes

American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933–2004)

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Susan Sontag (16 January 1933 – 28 December 2004) was an American essayist, literary critic, cultural theorist, and political activist.

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Alternative Names: Susan Rosenblatt • Susan Lee Sontag • Susan Lee Rosenblatt

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The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

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

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.

Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.

It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive (...). But whatever you took home from the movies was only part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours - which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

War has been the norm and peace the exception

Alone, alone. I am alone – I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, I’m here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it — by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.