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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up

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
Healthy
Prevents
Existence
Pornography
Literature
Gaps
Doe
Precisely
Persons
Sexual
Person
Opening
Pornographic
Life
Drive
Wedge
Ordinary
Wedges

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I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.
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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
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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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Most of my reading is rereading.
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
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I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
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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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I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
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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 process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
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