Quote

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.

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
Beauty
Class
Born
Emerges
Self
Pleased
Lifestyle
Confidence
Please
Says

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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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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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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
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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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I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
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I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
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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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Art is seduction, not rape.
Susan Sontag
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Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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