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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

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
Detachment
Tragedy
Comedy
Experience

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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
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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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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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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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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
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The happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.
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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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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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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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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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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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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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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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How boring just to be a body.
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