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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
Attainment
Mobile
Present
Existence
Future
Precarious
Past
Flux
Relevance
Intensely

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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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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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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
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The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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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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...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
Susan Sontag