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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.

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
Walter
Quotations
Noticed
Fascinated
Lists
Different
Godard
People
Borges
Benjamin

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
Susan Sontag
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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
Susan Sontag
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
Susan Sontag
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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
Susan Sontag
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
Susan Sontag
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
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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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag
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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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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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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
Susan Sontag
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
Susan Sontag
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
Susan Sontag
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
Susan Sontag
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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
Susan Sontag