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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

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
Transgressions
Transgression
Sequence
Successful
History
Art

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In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: Oh, this is where it comes from! I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
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The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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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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A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
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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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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
Susan Sontag
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
Susan Sontag
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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
Susan Sontag
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Susan Sontag
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Susan Sontag
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
Susan Sontag