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Writing is a mysterious activity.

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
Mysterious
Activity
Writing

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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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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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The white race is the cancer of human history.
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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
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Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
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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.
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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