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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
Way
Finally
Series
Failing
Ways
Certain
Expressive
Give
Permission
Giving
Leap
Writing
Fail
More quotes by Susan Sontag
The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
Susan Sontag
In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person I create myself.
Susan Sontag
With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
Susan Sontag
Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
Susan Sontag
Sanity is a cozy lie.
Susan Sontag
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
Susan Sontag
Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
Susan Sontag
Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
Susan Sontag
writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
Susan Sontag
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
Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
Susan Sontag
In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
Susan Sontag
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
Susan Sontag
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Susan Sontag
Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
Susan Sontag
Art is a form of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
