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
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques how pornography can create a disconnect between one's sexual identity and everyday life.
Susan Sontag's quote highlights the negative impact of pornographic literature on personal identity and sexual expression. It suggests that engaging with such material can lead to a separation of one's sexual being from their everyday existence, undermining the integrity of a healthy, holistic experience of sexuality that should be integrated with one’s life and identity.
Themes
PornographySexualityIdentityExistenceLiterature
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on the effects of media on relationships, this quote can highlight concerns about how pornography shapes perceptions of sexuality.
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
There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one's religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?
Eric HofferRead
With truths of a certain kind, it is not enough to make them appear convincing: one must also make them felt. Of such kind are moral truths.
Baron De MontesquieuRead
Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?
Virginia WoolfRead
People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.
Milan KunderaRead
In lazy apathy let stoics boast, their virtue fixed, 'tis fixed as in a frost.
Alexander PopeRead