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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.

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
Ideas
Mold
Sensibility
Rough
Proof
Tools
Longer
Crammed
System
Handled
Idea
Hardened

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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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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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
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Art is seduction, not rape.
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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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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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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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To photograph is to confer importance.
Susan Sontag
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
Susan Sontag