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

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Art is seduction, not rape.
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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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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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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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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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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
Susan Sontag
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
Susan Sontag
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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
Susan Sontag
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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
Susan Sontag
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
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I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
Susan Sontag
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The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
Susan Sontag