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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

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
Imagine
Possessing
Everyone
Aspire
May
Allowed
Ideals
Oneself
Healthy
Ones
Health
Comfortably

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Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.
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The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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Courage is morally neutral.
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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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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.
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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.
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
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That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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