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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
Sentences
Pay
Attention
Words
Love
World
Agonize

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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
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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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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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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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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
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Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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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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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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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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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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