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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

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
Eager
Vitality
Stay
Attention
Makes
Others
Eagerness
Connects

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
Susan Sontag
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I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
Susan Sontag
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Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
Susan Sontag
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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
Susan Sontag
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
Susan Sontag
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
Susan Sontag
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
Susan Sontag
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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
Susan Sontag
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
Susan Sontag
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I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
Susan Sontag
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Susan Sontag
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How boring just to be a body.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
Susan Sontag
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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
Susan Sontag
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taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag