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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.

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
Graduation
Afraid
Less
Hard

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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
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It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
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The happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.
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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
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Art is a form of consciousness.
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
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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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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
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I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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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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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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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
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