850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

İnsan sonsuza dek kraliçe kalamaz. Gücünü devam ettirebilmek için ya tahttan vazgeçeceksin, yahut da şehit edileceksin. Ben birincisini seçtim.

İnsanlar gerçeğin, sadece onlar gerçeği dile getirdiği zaman var olduğunu anlayabilselerdi, ona daha çok saygı gösterirlerdi. İzin verin, bununla ne demek istediğimi açıklayayım. Gerçek, bilinen bir şey değil, her zaman söylenen bir şeydir. Konuşma ya da yazışma olmasaydı, herhangi bir şeyle ilgili bir gerçek de var olmazdı. Var olan, sadece görünen bir şey olurdu. Bu yüzden, benim hayatım ve uğraşlarım bence gerçek değildir. Onlar sadece benim hayatım ve uğraşlarım.

I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark-card store, and I used to save up my allowance and would buy them all. I even bought real lemons like Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations [laughing]. I thought everything in the Modern Library must be great.

El fotógrafo saquea y preserva, denuncia y consagra a la vez.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

To us, the difference between the #‎ photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #‎ photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

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.