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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

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
First
Repeated
Time
Shock
Sees
Surprise
Wear
Pornographic
Movie
Photographed
Felt
Atrocities
Firsts
Wears

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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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How boring just to be a body.
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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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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
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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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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
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The happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
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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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