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

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Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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Art is seduction, not rape.
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
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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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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.
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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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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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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
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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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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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