Quote

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Live
Popular
Seemingly
Unremitting
Writing
Terror
Twins
Rations
People
Fantasy
Served
Banality
Threat
Fearful
Inconceivable
Large
Opposed
Destinies
Destiny
Equally
Twin
Art
Allows
Continual
Two
Arts
Cope
Specters

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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
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The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
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'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
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Art is seduction, not rape.
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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