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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

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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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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
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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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When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
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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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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
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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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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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Art is seduction, not rape.
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
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Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.
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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
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