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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
Illness
Pursue
Health
Age
Reality
Pursues
Believe
Consciously
Sickness
Believes

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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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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.
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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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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
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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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Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
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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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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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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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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
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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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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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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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The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
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taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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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.
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