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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.

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

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
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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.
Susan Sontag
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
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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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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
Susan Sontag
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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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Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
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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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I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
Susan Sontag
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
Susan Sontag
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
Susan Sontag
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
Susan Sontag
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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
Susan Sontag
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
Susan Sontag
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Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
Susan Sontag