A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. Susan Sontag opposites lying ideas All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to. Susan Sontag intelligent conversation 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 an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. Susan Sontag eye war peace Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. Susan Sontag gun nature people Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material. Susan Sontag political disease real The white race is the cancer of human history. Susan Sontag cancer race white The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall. Susan Sontag instant maxims photograph Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony. Susan Sontag creative two culture What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment. Susan Sontag modern kind art War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins. Susan Sontag rip tears war Rules of taste enforce structures of power. Susan Sontag aesthetic structure taste The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences. Susan Sontag elements silence art Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings. Susan Sontag wings love-is thinking The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque. Susan Sontag empathy cities joy It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. Susan Sontag world-suffering aggravation suffering Love dies because its birth was an error. Susan Sontag divorce birth errors Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are. Susan Sontag pornography structure imagination Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past. Susan Sontag reality way past One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. Susan Sontag intention artist needs A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter. Susan Sontag psychology matter history
