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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

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
Nature
Specimen
America
Relic
Every
Relics
Always
Defensive
Suspect
Suspects
Progress
Becomes

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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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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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
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What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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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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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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My skull is crammed with quotations.
Susan Sontag
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Art is a form of consciousness.
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag