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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.

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
Consciousness
Pleasure
Moral
Art
Performs
Wells
Gratification
Well
Consists
Service
Intelligent

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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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How boring just to be a body.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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Ideas disturb the levelness of life
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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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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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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.
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
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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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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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