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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.

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
View
Mourning
Writer
Ecstasy
Views
Compassionate
Things
Complexes
Celebrate
Complex
Orchestrate
Writers
Incite
Expect
Articulate

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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We are ruled by quotations.
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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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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person I create myself.
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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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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.
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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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She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Susan Sontag
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
Susan Sontag