Quotes from Susan Sontag

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

I feel profoundly alone, cut off, unattractive…I feel unloveable. But I respect that unloveable solider—struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just, honourable. I respect myself.

To the militant, identity is everything.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

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.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here . Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there , and from which the United States-a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history-is exempt. That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful belief in American exceptionalism.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.

The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.

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

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.

Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.

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.

How can I describe my life to you? I think a lot, listen to music. I'm fond of flowers

I vulgarize my feelings by speaking of them too readily to others.

I don' t want to learn anything from the failure of this love.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

War has been the norm and peace the exception

But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.