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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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
Translated
Unstable
Compassion
Emotion
Action
Needs
Withers
Apathetic
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
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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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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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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.
Susan Sontag
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Susan Sontag
All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
Susan Sontag
Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
Susan Sontag
The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
Susan Sontag
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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Desire has no history.
Susan Sontag
Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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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
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
Susan Sontag
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Susan Sontag
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
Susan Sontag