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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

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
Intellectual
Upon
Art
Women
Critique
Memorable
Interpretation
Revenge
Criticism

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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
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Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
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I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
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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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This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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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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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
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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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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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