"It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe /though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived."
- Susan Sontag
"Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That we are here, prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening, while elsewhere in the world, right now in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio....
To be a traveler—and novelists are often travelers—is to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned home."
- Susan Sontag
"Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been, what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal, needs to be protected from people."
- Susan Sontag
"The émigrés from Communist countries we didn't listen to, who found it far easier to get published in the Reader's Digest than in The Nation or the New Statesman, were telling the truth. Now we hear them. Why didn't we hear them before, when they were telling us exactly what they tell us now? We thought we loved justice; many of us did. But we did not love the truth enough."
- Susan Sontag
"The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own."
- Susan Sontag
"I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams."
- Susan SontagSusan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was a well-known American essayist, novelist, intellectual, filmmaker and activist. Click images or Susan Sontag's name for links to biographies, interviews and the official Susan Sontag website.
I love some of her stuff (not wacky about her novels) - but her essays and cultural commentary cannot be beat.
ReplyDeleteI love this quote above:
"We thought we loved justice; many of us did. But we did not love the truth enough."
She is one of the few people to admit her error in that regard.
I know - that's what struck me about that quote. It is easy to be the critic on the outside who sees the errors in choices OTHER people make, but it displays a far greater strength of character to look back and say, "WE were wrong." and acknowledge one's own culpability as a part of the whole.
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