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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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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
Encounters
Fascinated
Originals
Instance
Live
Museum
World
Encounter
Museums
Copies

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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
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This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
Susan Sontag
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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Art is a form of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
Susan Sontag
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
Susan Sontag