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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

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
Nature
Interests
Modern
Interest
Understand

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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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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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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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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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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.
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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.
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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