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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

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
Self
Photography
Relationship
Question
Issues
Community
Use
Largest
Social
Opens
Reality
Uses

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
Susan Sontag
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The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
Susan Sontag
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Susan Sontag
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Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
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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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
Susan Sontag
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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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
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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
Susan Sontag
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Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
Susan Sontag
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
Susan Sontag