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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.

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
Many
Even
Things
Never
World
Described
Named

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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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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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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
Susan Sontag