Susan Sontag Quotes

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

~ Susan Sontag

Writing is a mysterious activity.

~ Susan Sontag

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

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

~ Susan Sontag

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

~ Susan Sontag

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

~ Susan Sontag

My library is an archive of longings.

~ Susan Sontag

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

~ Susan Sontag

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

~ Susan Sontag

Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)

~ Susan Sontag

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

~ Susan Sontag

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

~ Susan Sontag

No we should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

~ Susan Sontag

It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.

~ Susan Sontag

We - this we is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.

~ Susan Sontag

Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.

~ Susan Sontag

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.

~ Susan Sontag

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.

~ Susan Sontag

To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.

~ Susan Sontag

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

~ Susan Sontag

It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.

~ Susan Sontag

One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.

~ Susan Sontag

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.

~ Susan Sontag

What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.

~ Susan Sontag

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.

~ Susan Sontag

The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.

~ Susan Sontag

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

~ Susan Sontag

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

~ Susan Sontag

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to care more.

~ Susan Sontag

Often something looks, or is felt to look, better in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)

~ Susan Sontag

I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent.

~ Susan Sontag

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

~ Susan Sontag

To the militant, identity is everything.

~ Susan Sontag

Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent--war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

~ Susan Sontag

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

~ Susan Sontag

The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But for that it is necessary to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power.

~ 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 likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

~ Susan Sontag

I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.

~ Susan Sontag

But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.

~ Susan Sontag