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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
Originals
Instance
Live
Museum
World
Encounter
Museums
Copies
Encounters
Fascinated

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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.
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We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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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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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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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.
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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God, living is enormous!
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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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We are ruled by quotations.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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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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