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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

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
Home
Fervent
Make
Abroad
People
Picture
Photography
Travel
Seem
Past
Takers
Seems
Robbed

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Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
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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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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
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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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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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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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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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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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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
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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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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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