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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
Temperament
Sensibility
Ultimately
Ideas
Come
Precipitation
Crystallization

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A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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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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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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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.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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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.
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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
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That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
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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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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Susan Sontag