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Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.

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
Precipitation
Crystallization
Temperament
Sensibility
Ultimately
Ideas
Come

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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
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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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Desire has no history.
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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
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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.
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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.
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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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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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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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To photograph is to confer importance.
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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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Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are
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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
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...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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