Quotes from Susan Sontag

Let's take a positive view. The mountain is an emblem of all the forms of wholesale death: the deluge, the great conflagration (sterminator Vesevo, as the great poet was to say), but also of survival, of human persistence. In this instance, nature run amok also makes culture, makes artifacts, by murdering, petrifying history. In such disasters there is much to appreciate.

So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.

Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception.

cada vez es menos factible reflexionar sobre nuestra experiencia siguiendo la distinción entre imágenes y cosas, entre copias y originales

Fotografiar es esencialmente un acto de no intervención. La persona que interviene no puede registrar; la persona que registra no puede intervenir.

Así como la pintura se ha vuelto cada vez más conceptual, la poesía se ha definido cada vez más por su interés en lo visual.

Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it

An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. - Susan Sontag

Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it and still being good.

our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art-and in criticism today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Acho que não estou pronta para aprender como se escreve. Pensar com palavras, não com ideias.

It is often asserted that "the West" has increasingly come to see war itself as a spectacle. Reports of the death of reality—like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature—seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture.

Something is neutral only with respect to something else—like an intention or an expectation.

I think I feel better. I look at everything from the other end—instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.

Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier, from one's chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority.

La percepción del mundo comienza como una sinécdoque — ver la parte por el todo. La estructura del verdadero aprendizaje consiste en hallar totalidades cada vez más verdaderas, s[in] perder la percepción concreta de las partes.)

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

Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together.

Images of the sufferings endured in war are so widely disseminated now that it is easy to forget how recently such images became what is expected from photographers of note.

Hakk?n ve hakl?l???n bir tarafta, bask? ve adaletsizliÄŸin diÄŸer tarafta yer ald???na ve kavgan?n sürdürülmesi gerektiÄŸine inananlar aç?s?ndan önemli olan, tam da kimin, kim taraf?ndan öldürüldüÄŸüdür.

The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer - a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.