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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

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
Bourgeois
Signs
Universal
Thought
Disaffection
Militants
Surrealism
Typically

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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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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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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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We are ruled by quotations.
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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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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
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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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If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
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