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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.

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
Much
Terrible
Morals
Hear
Shocking
Modern
Embarrassing
Moral
Devoted
Getting
Bear
Pain
Painful
Lowering
Art
Changes
Formerly
Used
Bears
Threshold

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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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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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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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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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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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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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Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
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It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
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The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
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