Quote

Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

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
Painting
Paintings
Pieces
Photographs
History
Unlike
Photographic
Others
Images
Biography
Photograph
Invariably
Photography
Implies
Evidence
Biographies
Usually
Ongoing

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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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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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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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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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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
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10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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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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A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
Susan Sontag
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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
Susan Sontag
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
Susan Sontag
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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
Susan Sontag
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
Susan Sontag
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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
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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