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

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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.
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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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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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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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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.
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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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 photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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My skull is crammed with quotations.
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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
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Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
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