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

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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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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
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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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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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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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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.
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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
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