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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

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
Society
War
Whole
Contra
Waged
Physician
Physicians
Disease
Health

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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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A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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To photograph is to confer importance.
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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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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.
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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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