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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

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
Expected
Concentrating
Serve
Vigorous
Projects
Victims
Photography
Unfortunate
Purpose
Compassionate
Art
Enterprise
Without
Project
Victimization
Victim
Enterprises

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I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.
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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
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Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
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What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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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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The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
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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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Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.
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The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
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Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
Susan Sontag