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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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
Writer
Word
Unit
Units
Sentence
Prose
Sentences
Poet
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Ideas disturb the levelness of life
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
Susan Sontag
Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.
Susan Sontag
Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
Susan Sontag
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
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
Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
Susan Sontag
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
Susan Sontag
Writing is a mysterious activity.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
Susan Sontag
Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
Susan Sontag
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Susan Sontag
The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
Susan Sontag
The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Susan Sontag
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
Susan Sontag
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
