Susan Sontag cytaty

strona 4

„Zatem żyć znaczy być skazanym, mieć wyrok. Tyle, że nie dochodzi do wykonania tego wyroku. Być żywym to przede wszystkim trwać w stanie negatywnym.”

„Życie to film. Śmierć to fotografia.”

„Mit choroby jest czasem gorszy od samej choroby.”

„Jesteśmy bardzo wrażliwi na okropności podawane w formie obrazów fotograficznych, wrażliwsi niż w realnym życiu.”

„Fotografowanie jest równoznaczne z przywłaszczaniem sobie zdejmowanego przedmiotu. Oznacza to wchodzenie w pewien stosunek, który kojarzy się nam z poznaniem, czyli zawładnięciem.”

„Dzisiaj przyszła mi do głowy pewna myśl - tak jasna i oczywista! W pierwszej chwili wydała mi się wręcz niedorzeczna, wprawiła mnie w oszołomienie i wręcz lekką histerię - Mogę zrobić absolutnie wszystko i poza mną samą nie istnieje nic, co by mnie powstrzymało.”

“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.”

“If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.”

“Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.”

“One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.”

“Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”

“What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship”

“There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”

“All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.”

“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs are.”

“Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.”

“Can I love someone… and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.”

“Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

“Most of my reading is rereading.”

“The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.”

“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.”

“One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.”

“She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.”

“My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.”

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.”

“Desire has no history…”

“We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?”

“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”

“Elites presuppose masses.”

“Styles change, style doesn't.”

“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

“The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”

“It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”

“Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.”

“The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture one is inflicting on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the primal satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them.”