Public Republic

Photo: beamillion

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Photo: mark217

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.


Photo: Bort1974

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

Photo: robin.elaine

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

Photo: webhamster

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

Photo: colon+right.bracket

If I thought that what I’m doing when I write is expressing myself, I’d junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of use is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Photo: audreyjm529

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

Photo: audreyjm529

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on the forehead. Pay attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

The really important thing is not to reject anything.

Photo: Sudhamshu

Etymologically, ‘patient’ means sufferer.

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford.

Her books, all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, FSG published A Susan Sontag Reader.

Susan Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea.

Susan Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.

A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.

Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.

Susan Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.

http://www.susansontag.com/