Quotes from Susan Sontag

Pleasure of tragedy is vicarious suicide

I was thinking, Ursula said . . . that the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show 'still.' You can just show him being live.

En lugar de una hermenéutica, necesitamos una erótica del arte.

I have such strong tendencies to abandon myself to someone with whom I'm in love—to want to give up everything, to be possessed totally as well as to possess totally.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence… a way of being fully human.

I am thinking—talking—in images. I don't know how to write them down. Every feeling is physical.

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.

El acto fotográfico, un modo de certificar la experiencia, es también un modo de rechazarla: cuando se confina a la búsqueda de lo fotogénico, cuando se convierte la experiencia en una imagen, un recuerdo. El viaje se transforma en una estrategia para acumular fotos. La propia actividad fotográfica es tranquilizadora, y mitiga esa desorientación general que se suele agudizar con los viajes.

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.

Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness.

Ä°nsan sonsuza dek kraliçe kalamaz. Gücünü devam ettirebilmek için ya tahttan vazgeçeceksin, yahut da ÅŸehit edileceksin. Ben birincisini seçtim.

Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn.

Dearest - I'm sorry not to have written. Life is tough, and it's hard to talk while one is gritting one's teeth...

an expression of human consciousness, consciousness seeking to know itself.

Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of character.

Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrangement.

My repressed feelings leak out —slowly – in the form of resentment – a continual leakage of resentment.

The story must strike a nerve—in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.

The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer — delicately you added: all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.)

What we call nihilism (now) I simply call thought. What thinking doesn't lead to nihilism? (pg. 440)

Dzisiaj przysz?a mi do g?owy pewna my?l - tak jasna i oczywista! W pierwszej chwili wyda?a mi si? wr?cz niedorzeczna, wprawi?a mnie w oszo?omienie i wr?cz lekk? histeri? - Mog? zrobi? absolutnie wszystko i poza mn? sam? nie istnieje nic, co by mnie powstrzyma?o.

I think that the old-young polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. The values associated with youth and with masculinity are considered to be the human norms, and anything else is taken to be at least less worthwhile or inferior.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.

Fotografiar es conferir importancia. Quizás no haya tema que no pueda ser embellecido; es más, no hay modo de suprimir la tendencia intrínseca de toda fotografía a dar valor a sus temas.