“Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.”
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Author detail
Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include *On Photography*, *Against Interpretation*, *Styles of Radical Will*, *The Way We Live Now*, *Illness as Metaphor*, *Regarding the Pain of Others*, *The Volcano Lover*, and *In America*. Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or travelling to, areas of conflict, including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology. Although her essays and speeches sometimes drew controversy, she has been described as "one of the most influential critics of her generation." **Source**: [Susan Sontag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag) on Wikipedia.
Quotes
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“Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.”
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“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.”
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“AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.”
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“Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.”
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“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
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“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”
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“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
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“Sanity is a cozy lie.”
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“A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.”
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“It is not the position, but the disposition.”
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“The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.”
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“Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.”
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“'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.”
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“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.”
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“The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.”
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“A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.”
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“Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.”
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“Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.”
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“I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.”
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“To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relen...”
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