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the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

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
Building
Process
Self
Always
Slow
Oneself
Works

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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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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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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
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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.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
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This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
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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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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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