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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

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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
Large
Populations
Awareness
Catastrophe
Taken
Privileged
Part
Represent
Seems
Aids
Feel
Model
Catastrophes
Feels
Population
Await
Models
Occupies

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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
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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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Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.
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It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
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I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.
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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
Susan Sontag
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I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
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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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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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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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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
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You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag