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Desire has no history.

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
History
Desire

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
Susan Sontag
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
Susan Sontag
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All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
Susan Sontag
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Susan Sontag
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
Susan Sontag
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Susan Sontag
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
Susan Sontag
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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
Susan Sontag
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
Susan Sontag
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
Susan Sontag
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
Susan Sontag
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Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
Susan Sontag
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
Susan Sontag
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
Susan Sontag
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Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
Susan Sontag
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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
Susan Sontag
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Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.
Susan Sontag
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Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
Susan Sontag