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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

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
Structure
Aren
Pornographic
Imagination
Representations
Structures
Pornography
Representation
Images
Experiences

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What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
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The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.
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I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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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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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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