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

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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
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We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
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'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
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Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.
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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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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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Ideas disturb the levelness of life
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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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Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
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