Quote

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

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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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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We are ruled by quotations.
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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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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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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 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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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
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The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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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.
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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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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If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
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