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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

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
People
Fantasy
Served
Banality
Threat
Fearful
Inconceivable
Large
Opposed
Destinies
Destiny
Equally
Twin
Art
Allows
Continual
Two
Arts
Cope
Specters
Live
Popular
Seemingly
Unremitting
Writing
Terror
Twins
Rations

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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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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
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Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
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10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
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Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
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I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
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Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
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Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.
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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
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You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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