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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

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
Advice
Diseases
Recesses
Modern
Expressed
Cellular
Causes
Deepest
Recess
Passion
Inward
Assert
Idea
Moves
Expresses
Moving
Romantic
Extended
Character
Cancer
Striking
Ideas
Disease
Invariably
Blighting

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''
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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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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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To photograph is to confer importance.
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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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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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
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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 whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag