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Ideas disturb the levelness of life

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
Ideas
Life
Disturb

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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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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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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
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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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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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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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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
Susan Sontag
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
Susan Sontag
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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
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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!
Susan Sontag
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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
Susan Sontag
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag