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The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

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
Singular
Treatment
Romantic
Illness
Interesting
Death
Made
Asserts
People
Illnesses

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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
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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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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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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
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She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
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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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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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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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You can always be quoted.
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The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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