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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

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
Rules
None
Healthy
Becoming
Alive
Keep
Formulating
Valid
Although

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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
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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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When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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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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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Art is seduction, not rape.
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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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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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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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Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
Susan Sontag
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.
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