Susan Sontag Quotes
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo-Conservatives.
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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
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The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
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Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
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Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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To collect photographs is to collect the world.
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Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling.
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If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
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10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.
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Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
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Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.
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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
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The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.
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It's almost as if this is the fundamental procedure in modern society: duplication and recycling.
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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
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Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.
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The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.
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