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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

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
Social
Pathology
Mainly
Aging
Older
Disease
Imagination
Growing
Ordeal
Moral
Ordeals

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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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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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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
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Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
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Courage is morally neutral.
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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