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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Charm
Depression
Fit
Charms
Minus
Fits
Animation
Melancholy

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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
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What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
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The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
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Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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