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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

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
Feeds
Ambition
Others
Doe
Work

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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 likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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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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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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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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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''
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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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Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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