A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall. Susan Sontag endure easier changed What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. Susan Sontag women beautiful beauty 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 kissing inspiring inspirational The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. Susan Sontag cancer white civilization All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears. Susan Sontag accepting understanding world To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. Susan Sontag moments photograph time To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time. Susan Sontag cameras gun people ...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. Susan Sontag photograph photography Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties Susan Sontag modern-life loss culture In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings. Susan Sontag sadness sorrow wings I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence. Susan Sontag care intelligent people Life is a movie; death is a photograph. Susan Sontag photograph life-is I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. Susan Sontag transformation self people The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and assertiveness it may not have had in the original. I think the quality of inaccessibility, the mystery, is important - that whatever matters can't be taken in on just one reading or one seeing. This is certainly a quality of the little of art that lasts. Susan Sontag taken reading art Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism. Susan Sontag photography reality ideas The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied. Susan Sontag photography lust inspire 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction. Susan Sontag moved population matter Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy Susan Sontag fascination reality thinking How boring just to be a body. Susan Sontag boring body Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. Susan Sontag eagerness vitality attention
