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It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.

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
Start
Beginnings
Sense
Lake
Hard
Dread
Great
Lakes
Writing
Begin
Always
Cold
Trepidation
Like
Says
Leaping
Decision
Nietzsche

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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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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Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
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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).
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
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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.
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
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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.
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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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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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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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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
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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.
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