Quote

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.

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
Move
Seeing
Moving
Customarily
Lives
Dense
Living
Fluid
Persons
Conduct
Able
Merely
Life
Depends

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
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We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
Susan Sontag
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Most of my reading is rereading.
Susan Sontag
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
Susan Sontag
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
Susan Sontag
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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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A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
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