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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
Past
Accelerate
Become
Surreal
Change
Continues
Time
Historical
Subjects
Beauty
Possible
Making
Vanishing

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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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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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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 only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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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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Most of my reading is rereading.
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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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.
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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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