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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
Intention
Photograph
Tend
Generalized
Particular
Pathos
Quality
Swallowed
Past
Intentions
Time
Photographs
Qualities
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
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That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.
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Desire has no history.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
Susan Sontag
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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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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To photograph is to confer importance.
Susan Sontag
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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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
Susan Sontag
An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
Susan Sontag
Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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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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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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