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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
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Helping
Anything
Doubtful
Strictly
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More quotes by Susan Sontag

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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
Susan Sontag
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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.
Susan Sontag
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A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
Susan Sontag
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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
Susan Sontag
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It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
Susan Sontag
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'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
Susan Sontag
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I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
Susan Sontag
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
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writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
Susan Sontag
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Susan Sontag
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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Susan Sontag
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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
Susan Sontag
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Susan Sontag
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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
Susan Sontag
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
Susan Sontag
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I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
Susan Sontag
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I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
Susan Sontag
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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).
Susan Sontag
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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