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

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
Susan Sontag
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
Susan Sontag
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Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
Susan Sontag
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The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
Susan Sontag
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
Susan Sontag
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
Susan Sontag
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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
Susan Sontag
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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
Susan Sontag
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
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Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
Susan Sontag
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Art is seduction, not rape.
Susan Sontag
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
Susan Sontag
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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
Susan Sontag
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She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
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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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
Susan Sontag
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
Susan Sontag