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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.

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
Rooted
Possibility
Understanding
Ability

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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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...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
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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.
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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The happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
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We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
Susan Sontag
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Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
Susan Sontag
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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
Susan Sontag