Quote

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

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
Citizens
Pollution
Junkies
Turn
Industrial
Enhanced
Turns
Photographs
Confirmed
Everyone
Societies
Junkie
Experience
Aesthetic
Needing
Reality
Mental
Consumerism
Form
Photograph
Addicted
Image
Irresistible

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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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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
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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.
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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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What we need is to use what we have.
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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.
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
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One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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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 easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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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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