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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect 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
Give
Enterprise
Whole
Images
Giving
Photograph
Anthology
World
Finally
Grandiose
Result
Photographic
Hold
Collect
Results
Photographs
Sense
Heads

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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
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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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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
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Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
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Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
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The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
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I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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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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Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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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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