Quote

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.

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
Make
Oneself
Atrocious
Weakness
Incorrigible
Answer
Numb
Objects
Steel
Answers
Contemplation
Existence
Images
Different
Acknowledge
Needs
Several

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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
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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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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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Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
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Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
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