Quote

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

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
Seems
Expectations
Done
Ordinary
Even
Seem
Made
Violence
Unparalleled
Humanity
Constitutes
Sense
Apocalypse
Reality
Expectation
Part
Horizon

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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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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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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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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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Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
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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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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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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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10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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My skull is crammed with quotations.
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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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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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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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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
Susan Sontag