850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation – however minute.

In photographing dwarfs, you don’t get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs.

We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.

To photograph people is to violate them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Regenerative experiences: Plunge into the sea. The sun. An old city. Silence.

Look, what I want is to be fully present in my life – to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself in your life, giving full attention to the world, which includes you. You are not the world, the world is not identical to you, but you’re in it and paying attention to it. That’s what a writer does – a writer pays attention to the world.

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it – say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken – or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to “care” more.

To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader’s own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.