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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

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
Kind
Really
Life
Inclusive
Seemed
Writer
Wanted
Every

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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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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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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person I create myself.
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It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
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To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are
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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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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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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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To photograph is to confer importance.
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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.
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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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Desire has no history.
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