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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

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
Granted
Subject
Subjects
Taken
Looking
Pain
People

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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
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Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
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Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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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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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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We are ruled by quotations.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
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