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.

— Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes

Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one.

— Susan Sontag

The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.

— Susan Sontag

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.

— Susan Sontag

Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, ‘Alice, Alice, what is the answer?’ Her companion replied, ‘There is no answer.’ Gertrude Stein continued, ‘Well, then, what is the question?’ and fell back dead.

— Susan Sontag

Pleasure of tragedy is vicarious suicide.

— Susan Sontag

I am thinking – talking – in images. I don’t know how to write them down. Every feeling is physical.

— Susan Sontag

Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.

— Susan Sontag

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.

— Susan Sontag

She increases her burden of self-hatred, she behaves destructively with people she loves.

— Susan Sontag

My repressed feelings leak out – slowly – in the form of resentment – a continual leakage of resentment.

— Susan Sontag

My loyalty to the past – my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most.

— Susan Sontag

To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation. 4.

— Susan Sontag

To look at something which is “empty” is still to be looking, still to be seeing something – if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations.

— Susan Sontag

Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves – how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one “role” to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I’m supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it’s successfully executed.

— Susan Sontag

Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not “Apocalypse Now” but “Apocalypse From Now On.

— Susan Sontag

To say a feeling, an impression is to diminish it – expel it.

— Susan Sontag

I have such strong tendencies to abandon myself to someone with whom I’m in love – to want to give up everything, to be possessed totally as well as to possess totally.

— Susan Sontag

Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness.

— Susan Sontag

Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn.

— Susan Sontag

Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind’s need or capacity for self-estrangement.

— Susan Sontag
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