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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

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
Ends
Today
Everything
Book
World
Exists
Photograph
Photography
Order

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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
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To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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My skull is crammed with quotations.
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Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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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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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.
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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
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