Susan Sontag Quotes

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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.

Susan Sontag
Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

Susan Sontag
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

Susan Sontag
The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.

Susan Sontag
This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

Susan Sontag
The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

Susan Sontag
It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

Susan Sontag
Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.

Susan Sontag
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato's Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.

Susan Sontag
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.

Susan Sontag
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

Susan Sontag
A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way.

Susan Sontag
If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

Susan Sontag
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

Susan Sontag
But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.

Susan Sontag
Writing is an activity that in my experience doesn't get easier with practice. On the contrary.

Susan Sontag
In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

Susan Sontag
As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.

Susan Sontag
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past-are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic
feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

Susan Sontag
Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.

Susan Sontag
There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.

Susan Sontag
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Susan Sontag
The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

Susan Sontag
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

Susan Sontag