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The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
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
Art
Offer
Form
Ultimately
Give
Forms
May
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Take
Pleasure
Giving
Though
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Always
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Time
Given
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More quotes by Susan Sontag
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.
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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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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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
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I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
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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
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
Susan Sontag
All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
Susan Sontag
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
Susan Sontag
My skull is crammed with quotations.
Susan Sontag
Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
Susan Sontag
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
