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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.

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
Without
Logic
Happening
Asymmetrical
Surprise
Consummation
Creating
Climax
Dreams
Operates
Rather
Surprises
Art
Network
Dream
Happenings

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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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.
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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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Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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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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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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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.
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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
Susan Sontag
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Art is a form of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
Susan Sontag
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
Susan Sontag
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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
Susan Sontag
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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
Susan Sontag
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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