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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.

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
Littles
Wet
Little
Nightmare
World
Witty
Stocked
Mostly
Amounted
Fantasy
Surrealism
Dreams
Contents
Painting
Nightmares
Dream
Fantasies

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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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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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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
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Art is seduction, not rape.
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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
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