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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

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
Beauty
Nowhere
Moral
Unfortunately
Art
Tendencies
Persons
Extremely
Perishable
Person
Artistic
Durable
Like
Morality
Rapidly
Physical
Decay
Intellectual
Tendency

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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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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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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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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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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
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That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
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