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

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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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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
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Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
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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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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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Art is seduction, not rape.
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
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