Susan Sontag citations (168 citations, Page 6)

Susan Sontag: 168 citations 0 J'aime

Susan Sontag: Citations en anglais

“Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.”

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Susan Sontag livre On Photography

"The Image-World", p. 154
On Photography (1977)

“We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.”

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Susan Sontag

"Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag" in Salmagundi, No. 31-32 (Fall/Winter 1975), p. 29; later published in Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995) edited by Leland A. Poague, p. 77

“"Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible.”

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Susan Sontag

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)

“The United States is a generically religious society. That is, in the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.”

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Susan Sontag

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)

“The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war — for "the war on terror" is nothing less than that.”

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Susan Sontag

Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)

“To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings."”

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Susan Sontag

Source: Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), p. 7

“As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all to easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be “stimulated,” into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, “the man who unmasks his fictions” through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture “renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth.” There, he concludes, “no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.””

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Susan Sontag livre Styles of Radical Will

“‘Thinking against oneself’: reflections on Cioran,” p. 85
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.”

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Susan Sontag livre On Photography

In Plato's Cave, p. 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=B8DktTyeRNkC&q=%22Photography+has+become+almost+as+widely+practiced+an+amusement+as+sex+and+dancing%22&pg=PA8#v=onepage
Previously published as Photography http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1973/oct/18/photography/ in The New York Review of Books, 18 October 1973
On Photography (1977)

“Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die.
A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place. Wars, genocides — that happened here once, but no longer. It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not "really" Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all.”

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Susan Sontag

"Why Are We In Kosovo?" inThe New York Times Magazine http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E1DA163DF931A35756C0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all (2 May 1999)

“And isn't it usually so, that lovers who share their daily lives with each other gradually find they need to put very little into words?”

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Susan Sontag

Source: Death Kit (1967), p.270

“It depends on me, whether I'm happy within myself.”

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Susan Sontag

Source: Death Kit (1967), p.189

“According to an old rule of psychic contagion: that absence of clarity or outright confusion in one, just one specific, local matter will end by infecting the whole of one's judgment.”

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Susan Sontag

Source: Death Kit (1967), p.160

“To love one's work is a way of loving oneself, and leaves one freer to love other people.
But beware the difference between loving one's work and being merely engrossed in it.”

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Susan Sontag

Source: Death Kit (1967), p.149

“Don't be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable.”

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Susan Sontag

Source: Death Kit (1967), p.73 [Page numbers per the Penguin Modern Classics 2009 Edition]

“Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. That illness can be not an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more convincingly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation.”

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Susan Sontag livre AIDS and Its Metaphors

Source: AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989), ch. 4, p. 125, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42013-7 ; later published in combination with Illness As Metaphor. This combined edition is the one referenced here.