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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

Susan Sontag

I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
SUSAN SONTAG

People Transformation
I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.
SUSAN SONTAG

Audience Literature Writing
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
SUSAN SONTAG

Death Painting Photography Reality
Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
SUSAN SONTAG

Death Life Photograph
I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.
SUSAN SONTAG

Courage Inspirational Yourself
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
SUSAN SONTAG

Care Intelligence People
Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
SUSAN SONTAG

Love Person Ruin Willing
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
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
SUSAN SONTAG

Action Compassion Need
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
SUSAN SONTAG

Destroy History
Photographers are always imposing.
SUSAN SONTAG

Imposing One Liner Photographer
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
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
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
SUSAN SONTAG

Change Easy Endurance
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
SUSAN SONTAG

Blame Evil Identify Need
To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.
SUSAN SONTAG

Frame Photography
My library is an archive of longings.
SUSAN SONTAG

Book Inspirational One Liner Reading
It is not the position, but the disposition.
SUSAN SONTAG

Attitude Inspirational Motivational One Liner
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
SUSAN SONTAG

Pain Photography
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
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
SUSAN SONTAG

People Reality Women
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
SUSAN SONTAG

Attention Thinking World
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
SUSAN SONTAG

Comedy Feeling Tragedy
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
SUSAN SONTAG

Art Need Place
I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
SUSAN SONTAG

Encouragement Inspirational Life
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
Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
SUSAN SONTAG

Mad People Potential

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

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Popular Authors

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