Quote

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

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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
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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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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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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
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God, living is enormous!
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.
Susan Sontag
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Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
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Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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Ideas disturb the levelness of life
Susan Sontag