Frases de Susan Sontag página 6

“Quanto mais retrocedemos na história menos nítida é a distinção entre imagens e coisas reais, como observou E. H. Gombrich; nas sociedades primitivas, a coisa e a sua imagem não eram mais do que duas manifestações diferentes, ou seja, fisicamente distintas, da mesma energia ou espírito. A isso se deve a suposta eficácia das imagens para propiciar e controlar presenças de grande poder. Esses poderes, essas presenças estavam presentes nelas.”

Variante: Eu não estava querendo que meus sonhos interpretassem minha vida, mas antes que minha vida interpretasse meus sonhos.

“Quando faço uma fotografia", escreve Siskind, "quero que seja um objeto onovo, completo e autosuficiente, cuja condição básica é a ordem." Para Cartier-Bresson, tirar fotografias é "encontrar a estrutura do mundo, deleitar-se com o prazer puro da forma", revelar que "em todo este caos, há ordem".”

On Photography

“A fotografia não se limita a reproduzir o real, recicla-o, o que constitui um processo-chave de uma sociedade moderna”

On Photography

“Toda a capacidade de compreender está enraizada na capacidade de dizer não.”

On Photography

“O fotógrafo é um superturista, um prolongamento do antropólogo, que visita os nativos e regressa com notícias dos seus costumes exóticos e estranhos ornamentos. O fotógrafo procura sempre colonizar novas experiências ou encontrar novos modos de olhar para temas familiares - para lutar contra o tédio.”

On Photography

“As fotografias eram vistas como um modo de dar informação a pessoas que não tinham o hábito da leitura. o Daily News ainda se autodenomina New York's Picture Newspaper, apelando a uma identificação populista. No extremo oposto da escala, o Le Monde, um jornal destinado a leitores preparados, bem informados, não utiliza quaisquer fotografias, pois pressupõe-se que, para os seus leitores, a fotografia só serviria de ilustração para a análise contida num artigo.”

On Photography

“Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.”

On Photography

Susan Sontag: Frases em inglês

“We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.”

Susan Sontag livro On Photography

"The Image-World", p. 154
On Photography (1977)

“"Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible.”

"Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag" in Salmagundi, No. 31-32 (Fall/Winter 1975), p. 29; later published in Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995) edited by Leland A. Poague, p. 77

“The United States is a generically religious society. That is, in the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.”

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)

“The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war — for "the war on terror" is nothing less than that.”

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)

“To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings."”

Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)

“As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all to easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be “stimulated,” into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, “the man who unmasks his fictions” through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture “renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth.” There, he concludes, “no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.””

Fonte: Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), p. 7

“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.”

Susan Sontag livro Styles of Radical Will

“‘Thinking against oneself’: reflections on Cioran,” p. 85
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

“Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die.
A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place. Wars, genocides — that happened here once, but no longer. It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not "really" Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all.”

Susan Sontag livro On Photography

In Plato's Cave, p. 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=B8DktTyeRNkC&q=%22Photography+has+become+almost+as+widely+practiced+an+amusement+as+sex+and+dancing%22&pg=PA8#v=onepage <br class="br">Previously published as Photography http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1973/oct/18/photography/ in The New York Review of Books, 18 October 1973 <br class="br">On Photography (1977)

“And isn't it usually so, that lovers who share their daily lives with each other gradually find they need to put very little into words?”

"Why Are We In Kosovo?" inThe New York Times Magazine http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E1DA163DF931A35756C0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all (2 May 1999)

“It depends on me, whether I'm happy within myself.”

Fonte: Death Kit (1967), p.270

“According to an old rule of psychic contagion: that absence of clarity or outright confusion in one, just one specific, local matter will end by infecting the whole of one's judgment.”

Fonte: Death Kit (1967), p.189

“To love one's work is a way of loving oneself, and leaves one freer to love other people.
But beware the difference between loving one's work and being merely engrossed in it.”

Fonte: Death Kit (1967), p.160

“Don't be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable.”

Fonte: Death Kit (1967), p.149

“Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. That illness can be not an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more convincingly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation.”

Fonte: Death Kit (1967), p.73 [Page numbers per the Penguin Modern Classics 2009 Edition]

“Shall I tell you about getting older? When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don't fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty. So what's new?”

Susan Sontag livro AIDS and Its Metaphors

Fonte: AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989), ch. 4, p. 125, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42013-7 ; later published in combination with Illness As Metaphor. This combined edition is the one referenced here.

“If America is the culmination of Western white civilisation, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation.”

Fonte: "Finding fact from fiction", The Guardian (27 May 2000) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/may/27/fiction.features

“I don't feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my lonliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall, like seeking love in a whorehouse.”

Fonte: Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57