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The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

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
Living
Fear
Life
Wishes
Recognition
Becoming
Wish
Born

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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
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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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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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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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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 photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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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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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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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 only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
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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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My skull is crammed with quotations.
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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.
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