Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

Essayist, Critic, Activist

Susan Sontag was an influential American writer and thinker, known for her critical essays on art, culture, and politics.

Art Photography Writing People World Thinking
Born
January 16, 1933
Died
September 28, 2004
Quotes
540
Rank
#561

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Susan Sontag quotes (page 8 of 27)

540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Susan Sontag Essayist, Critic, Activist
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"Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it."

Art Real Knowing
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"I have been told that I am a "natural" feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things."

Feminist Facts Problem
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"Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes."

Beauty Beautiful Eye
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"The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both."

Inspiration Writing Guilt
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"Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals."

Art Pain Bears
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"To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response."

Taste Faculty Response
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"Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real."

Photography Art Real
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"I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry."

Idols Morality Consciousness
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"Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images."

Photography Reality Way
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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"

Opening Up Healthy Ordinary
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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."

Memories Past Touching
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"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."

Photography Travel Experience
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"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''"

Art Revenge Order
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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."

Party Reality Self
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"As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure."

Insecure Past Space
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"Lying is an elementary means of self-defense."

Lying Mean Self
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"If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment."

Tragedy Comedy Detachment
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"All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to."

Intelligent Conversation
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"Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph."

Photography Book Order
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