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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

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
Intensely
Attainment
Mobile
Present
Existence
Future
Precarious
Past
Flux
Relevance

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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
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Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
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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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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
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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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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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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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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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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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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
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Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
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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.
Susan Sontag
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The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
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Art is a form of consciousness.
Susan Sontag