Quote

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

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
Books
Dream
Also
Arbitrary
Give
Model
Book
Memory
Self
Models
Giving
Dreams
Memories

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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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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
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Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
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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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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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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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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
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The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
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The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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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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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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