Susan Sontag Quotes

“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.”
― Susan Sontag

“I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I am tired.”
― Susan Sontag, I, etcetera

“Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966)...For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman'.”
― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

“I am sometimes asked about the concept or definition of a 'public intellectual,' and though I find the whole idea faintly silly, I believe it should ideally mean that the person so identified is self-sustaining and autonomously financed. Susan was pre-eminently one such.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“El silencio es cualquier cosa menos la ausencia de significado.”
― Mónica Ojeda, La desfiguración Silva

“...Usted le ofreció a la gente nuevas maneras de imaginar, al tiempo que proclamaba una y otra vez nuestra deuda con el pasado, sobre todo con la literatura. Afirmó que le debemos a la literatura casi todo lo que somos y lo que hemos sido. Si los libros desaparecen, desaparecerá la historia y también los seres humanos. Estoy segura de que tiene razón. Los libros no son sólo la suma arbitraria de nuestros sueños y de nuestra memoria. También nos ofrecen el modelo de la propia trascendencia. Algunos creen que la lectura es sólo una manera de evadirse: una evasión del mundo diario “real” a uno imaginario, al mundo de los libros. Los libros son mucho más. Son una manera de ser del todo humano....”
― Susan Sontag fragmento de "Carta a Borges"

“Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”
― Susan Sontag

“Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“I think that the old-young polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. The values associated with youth and with masculinity are considered to be the human norms, and anything else is taken to be at least less worthwhile or inferior.”
― Susan Sontag

“Dividing time into Past, Present, and Future suggests that reality is distributed equally among three parts, but in fact the past is the most real of all. The future is, inevitably, an accumulation of loss, and dying is something we all do in our lives.”
― Susan Sontag, On Women