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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.

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
Going
Grain
Consists
Sexual
Sex
Pleasure
Form
Wells
Attractiveness
Well
Refined

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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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We are ruled by quotations.
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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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Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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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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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
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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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Ideas disturb the levelness of life
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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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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