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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

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
Photograph
Tend
Generalized
Particular
Pathos
Quality
Swallowed
Past
Intentions
Time
Photographs
Qualities
Intention

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All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
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...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
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To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
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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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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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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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