Quote

We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?

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
Told
Choices
Understanding
Fact
Facts
Negotiations
Must
Negotiation
Life
Series
Choose

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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Most of my reading is rereading.
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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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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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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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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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
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Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
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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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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
Susan Sontag