At the Same Time Quotes

“Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace. And “terrorist” is a more flexible word than “communist.” It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless---since there will always be some terrorism.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if we could not forget ourselves, at least some of the time? Who would we be if we could not learn? Forgive? Become something other than we are?”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“... courage is as contagious as fear.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“For Valéry, the nature of beauty is that it cannot be defined; beauty is precisely “the ineffable.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such—of what lies beyond the human and the made—and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches