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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!

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
Experience
Communion
Thought
Appropriate
Giving
Labor
Every
Intellectual
Birth
Gives
Perfect
Attained
Pain
Pains

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Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
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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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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
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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 unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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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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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
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Courage is morally neutral.
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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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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
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If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
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