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Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

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
Appropriate
Camera
Gun
Cameras
Murder
Sublimation
Photograph
Subliminal
Someone
Frightened
Time
Soft

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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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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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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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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 want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
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Desire has no history.
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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
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