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Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

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
Human
Relation
Humans
Result
Self
Actor
Life
Consciousness
Edification
Results
Hoarding
Audience
Spectacle
Actors
Relations
Live
Instinct

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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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.
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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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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
Susan Sontag
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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 romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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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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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
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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 I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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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
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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
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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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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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You can always be quoted.
Susan Sontag