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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.

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
Makes
Add
Mean
Explain
Trying
Perfection
Laugh
Laughing
Joy
Shall
Cynically
Word
Hasten

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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 particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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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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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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The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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You can always be quoted.
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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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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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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
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God, living is enormous!
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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