The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims. Susan Sontag blame evil needs The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence. Susan Sontag prose units poet Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world. Susan Sontag heroic photography world 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. Susan Sontag insecure space past You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it. Susan Sontag photography people thinking It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones. Susan Sontag mysterious photography interesting Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything. Susan Sontag doubtful photograph helping On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone. Susan Sontag making-love simple doe I want to save my soul, that timid wind. Susan Sontag soul want wind So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. Susan Sontag photography successful beautiful Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. Susan Sontag has-beens ifs world One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not. Susan Sontag energy may people In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences. Susan Sontag silence expression art The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art. Susan Sontag creating dream art My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language. Susan Sontag speaks-french religious views When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese. Susan Sontag chinese photography people Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods. Susan Sontag self mean art 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. Susan Sontag experience photography travel Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace. And “terrorist” is a more flexible word than “communist.” It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless---since there will always be some terrorism. Susan Sontag islamic struggle war Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary. Susan Sontag acting names justice
