Quote

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

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
Change
Number
Destroyed
Disappearing
Human
Records
Cameras
Span
Humans
Numbers
Began
Device
Time
Started
Forms
Biological
Life
Moment
Available
Brief
World
Social
Rate
Devices
Duplicating
Moments
Photography
Landscape
Untold
Form
Record
Disappear
Undergo

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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
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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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The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
Susan Sontag
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
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I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
Susan Sontag
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
Susan Sontag
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
Susan Sontag
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Susan Sontag
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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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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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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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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.
Susan Sontag