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
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Literature opens doors to deeper understanding and freedom in life.
In this quote, Susan Sontag emphasizes that literature serves as a gateway to a broader and more liberated existence. In times when the importance of reading and introspection is questioned, she argues that literature is ultimately a form of freedom, allowing individuals to explore ideas, emotions, and experiences beyond their immediate reality, thus nurturing a sense of autonomy and self-discovery.
Themes
LiteratureFreedomReadingInwardnessValues
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion about the importance of literature in personal growth.
More from Susan Sontag
All quotes →Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan SontagRead
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Susan SontagRead
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Susan SontagRead
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.
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.
Susan SontagRead
Similar quotes
Language is an art, like brewing or baking.... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.
Charles DarwinRead
The whole enterprise of teaching managers is steeped in the ethic of data-driven analytical support. The problem is, the data is only available about the past. So the way we've taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when it's too late.
Clayton M. ChristensenRead
I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
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I don't think that our Founders would believe that America could long prosper if the people were not readers.
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Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.
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The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
Maryanne WolfRead