Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
SUSAN SONTAGNo ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.
More Susan Sontag Quotes
-
-
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
SUSAN SONTAG -
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
SUSAN SONTAG -
Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting’.
SUSAN SONTAG -
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
SUSAN SONTAG -
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
SUSAN SONTAG -
Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.
SUSAN SONTAG -
How boring just to be a body.
SUSAN SONTAG -
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
SUSAN SONTAG -
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 -
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.
SUSAN SONTAG -
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
SUSAN SONTAG -
It is not the position, but the disposition.
SUSAN SONTAG -
Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
SUSAN SONTAG -
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
SUSAN SONTAG -
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