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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

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
Age
Pursues
Reality
Consciously
Believe
Sickness
Believes
Illness
Pursue
Health

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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
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When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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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.
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
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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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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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