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Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

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
Humans
Numbers
Began
Device
Time
Started
Forms
Biological
Life
Moment
Available
Brief
World
Social
Rate
Devices
Duplicating
Moments
Photography
Landscape
Untold
Form
Record
Disappear
Undergo
Change
Number
Destroyed
Disappearing
Human
Records
Cameras
Span

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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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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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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
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The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
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