850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

The “happening” operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.

However painful they were, I needed my dreams – the metaphor for my introspection – if I was ever to be at peace.

All memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it’s the whole society.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory – part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction... What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little – have few verbal means. Eloquence – thinking in words – is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.

Did I feel all that? So much? As sounds decays into inadudibility, euphoria decays into indifference, and that is always unexpected, the way exalted feelings are weakened, undone by time.

We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.