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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the transformation of sensual experiences into a more primal sexuality, criticizing the lack of beauty in urban life.
Susan Sontag's quote highlights a stark observation about urban existence, particularly in New York City, where the rich layers of sensual experience are stripped away, leaving behind a raw and often unpleasant reality. She suggests that in such an environment, the essence of human experience becomes reduced to basic desires, losing its connection to the beauty and sensory richness that typically inspire deeper human interactions.
Themes
SensualitySexualityUrban LifeBeautyExperience
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can inspire a discussion at an urban art exhibition about the relationship between environment and human experience.
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
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
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
Similar quotes
Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
Lord ActonRead
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
Oscar WildeRead
In those days, our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in the making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.
Abraham LincolnRead
I was a controversial figure on my reservation when I was a kid. I was mouthy and opinionated and arrogant. Nothing has changed.
Sherman AlexieRead
If it's fiction, then it better be true.
Sherman AlexieRead
The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.
Gore VidalRead