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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.

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
Every
Zero
Time
Granted
Taking
Longer
Start
Community
True
Assumptions
Certain
Assumption

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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
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Most of my reading is rereading.
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Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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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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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
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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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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
Susan Sontag