Quote

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

Susan Sontag

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Memories
Books
Dream
Also
Arbitrary
Give
Model
Book
Memory
Self
Models
Giving
Dreams

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
Susan Sontag
Image
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Susan Sontag
Image
The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Susan Sontag
Image
The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
Susan Sontag
Image
When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Susan Sontag
Image
To photograph is to confer importance.
Susan Sontag
Image
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
Susan Sontag
Image
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
Susan Sontag
Image
Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
Susan Sontag
Image
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
Susan Sontag
Image
I love to read the way people love to watch television.
Susan Sontag
Image
The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
Image
Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
Susan Sontag
Image
Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
Susan Sontag
Image
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
Susan Sontag
Image
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
Susan Sontag
Image
Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
Susan Sontag
Image
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
Susan Sontag
Image
What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
Susan Sontag
Image
In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: Oh, this is where it comes from! I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
Susan Sontag