black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.
SUSAN SONTAG

Book Dream Memories
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
SUSAN SONTAG

Ideas Poet Writing
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
SUSAN SONTAG

Existence Science Space Time
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
SUSAN SONTAG

Art Photograph Time
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
SUSAN SONTAG

Disease Fear Sexuality
All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
SUSAN SONTAG

Acceptance Philosophy Understand World
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
SUSAN SONTAG

Live Old Oneself Recognition
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
SUSAN SONTAG

Book End Photography
I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.
SUSAN SONTAG

Courage Inspirational Yourself
All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
SUSAN SONTAG

Intelligent Life Talk
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

Attention Connection Inspirational Pay
In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.
SUSAN SONTAG

Inspirational Sad Sorrow Wings
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
SUSAN SONTAG

Lust Photography Satisfaction
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
SUSAN SONTAG

Comedy Feeling Tragedy
It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
SUSAN SONTAG

Hurt Love Moments Skin Walk
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
SUSAN SONTAG

Blame Evil Identify Need
A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.
SUSAN SONTAG

Book Education Goodness Heart World
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
SUSAN SONTAG

Attention Envy Feeling Pay People
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
SUSAN SONTAG

Art Photography Touch
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
SUSAN SONTAG

Destroy History
There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
SUSAN SONTAG

Cameras Photography
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.
SUSAN SONTAG

Artist Hands Writing
Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting’.
SUSAN SONTAG

Appreciation Beautiful Feeling
In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.
SUSAN SONTAG

Job Life Myself Poet Writing
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

Change Ideas Photography Reality
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
SUSAN SONTAG

Attention Thinking World
My library is an archive of longings.
SUSAN SONTAG

Book Inspirational One Liner Reading

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Susan Sontag Quotes