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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

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
Analysis
Tragedy
Possibility
Disguised
Exercise
Discussions
Modern
Exercises
Less
Literary
Cultural
Discussion

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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
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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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Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
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This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
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I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.
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What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
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I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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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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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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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.
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Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
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