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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

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
Everyone
Kingdom
Born
Holds
Night
Kingdoms
Wells
Illness
Well
Sick
Life
Health
Onerous
Side
Dual
Sides
Citizenship

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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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Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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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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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
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Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
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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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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
Susan Sontag