Susan Sontag Quotes

There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.

Never, ever forget history.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity

History takes time... History makes memory.

… history is that which transforms documents into monuments

If we do not honor our past, we lose our future. If we destroy our roots, we cannot grow.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages Lift this little book, Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die! Search the fading letters finding Steadfast in the broken binding All that once was I!

Only those with no memory insist on their originality.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'

Old Time the clock-setter.

Not everything was lost in the flow of time

I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man's diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books... If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everything in the past is great and everything modern is terrible. But I do think cities should be a mix of old things and new things.

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.

What is not recorded is not remembered.