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Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.

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
Doubtful
Strictly
Speaking
Photograph
Help
Understand
Helping
Anything

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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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What we need is to use what we have.
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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
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Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
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To photograph is to confer importance.
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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.
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
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The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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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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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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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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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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