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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

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
Water
Consisted
Everything
Painful
Life
Air
World
Physical
Elements
Land
Firepower
Four
Distancing
Simple
Exalting

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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
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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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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
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To photograph is to confer importance.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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Ideas disturb the levelness of life
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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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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