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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.
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
Possible
Making
Vanishing
Past
Accelerate
Become
Surreal
Change
Continues
Time
Historical
Subjects
Beauty
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
Susan Sontag
My skull is crammed with quotations.
Susan Sontag
We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
Susan Sontag
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
Susan Sontag
Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
Susan Sontag
Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
Susan Sontag
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag
The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
Susan Sontag
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Susan Sontag
Sanity is a cozy lie.
Susan Sontag
His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.
Susan Sontag
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
Susan Sontag
In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
Susan Sontag
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Susan Sontag
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Susan Sontag
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
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.
Susan Sontag