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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.

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
Consider
Voyage
Journey
Voyages
Stand
Preferred
Spiritual
Investigation
Stills
Metaphor
Still
Spirituality
Must
Traditional
Dissociate
Image
Voyager

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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
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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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Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
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I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
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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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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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