Quote

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

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
Ways
Certain
Expressive
Give
Permission
Giving
Leap
Writing
Fail
Way
Finally
Series
Failing

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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
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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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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
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Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
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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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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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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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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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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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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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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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