Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Susan SontagRead
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Loving someone can be painful and vulnerable, as it involves a deep emotional risk.
This quote by Susan Sontag expresses the pain and vulnerability that comes with love. It likens love to a self-sacrificial act where one gives their whole self to another, aware that the other person might not reciprocate that commitment, which could lead to emotional hurt and heartache.
Themes
LovePainVulnerabilityEmotionRelationship
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in discussions about the risks involved in intimate relationships.
More from Susan Sontag
All quotes βScience fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
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Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
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In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
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Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.
Susan SontagRead
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This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.
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Never forget that the most powerful force on earth is love.
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We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.
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The love within us is meant to extend outward. The closer we grow to our inner light, we feel a natural urge to share it. We all long for meaningful work, some creative endeavor that will be our ministry, by which the energies within us might flow out to help heal the world.
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