Quote

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

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Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger danger is only a means to success.
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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
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Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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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.
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
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Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
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