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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
Facts
Negotiations
Must
Negotiation
Life
Series
Choose
Told
Choices
Understanding
Fact

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
Susan Sontag
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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Susan Sontag
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
Susan Sontag
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Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
Susan Sontag
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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
Susan Sontag
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
Susan Sontag
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
Susan Sontag
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Susan Sontag
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Most of my reading is rereading.
Susan Sontag
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
Susan Sontag
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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
Susan Sontag
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Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
Susan Sontag
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
Susan Sontag
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Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Susan Sontag