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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
Every
Largest
Arbitrary
Sanity
Definitions
Madness
Society
Sense
Political

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In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person I create myself.
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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
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Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
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Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
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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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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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