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Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.

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
Men
Happens
Shame
Also
Older
Women
Regret
Human
Destiny
Humans
Happen
Painfully
Must
Getting
Apprehension
Even
Woman
Vulnerability
Something
Experience
Aging

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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
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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.
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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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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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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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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.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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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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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
Susan Sontag