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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

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
Political
Every
Largest
Arbitrary
Sanity
Definitions
Madness
Society
Sense

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
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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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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.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
Susan Sontag
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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Susan Sontag
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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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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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person I create myself.
Susan Sontag
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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Susan Sontag
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I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
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The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
Susan Sontag
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
Susan Sontag
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
Susan Sontag
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
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She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
Susan Sontag