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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.

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
Matter
Secular
Way
Psychology
Scientific
Sublimated
Large
Ostensibly
History
Spiritualism
Comes
Primacy
Spirit
Affirming
Part
Popularity

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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
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Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
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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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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
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writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
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The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
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Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
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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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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
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I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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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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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.
Susan Sontag