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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

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
Attention
Words
Love
World
Agonize
Sentences
Pay

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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
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The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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What we need is to use what we have.
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The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
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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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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
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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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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
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A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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