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

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
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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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The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
Susan Sontag
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
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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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taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
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In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: Oh, this is where it comes from! I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
Susan Sontag
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
Susan Sontag
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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
Susan Sontag
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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
Susan Sontag
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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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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
Susan Sontag