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Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes

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Famous Susan Sontag Quotes

“If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there.”

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“Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.”

PersonsDoeSecretCasesRecordsOffersIndependentAlternativesDumbDaily LifeVehicleJournalSuperficialAlasDeafSense Of SelfIlliterateJournalingKeeping A JournalSecret Thoughts
Author:Susan Sontag
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“Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness - pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.”

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Author:Susan Sontag
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“It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt”

PersonsArtMomentsVirtueSubjectsRight NowPhotographyPhotographNostalgiaVulnerabilityTouchedMortalityTwilightRelentlessNostalgicFreezingPathosMemento MoriMementoMutability
Author:Susan Sontag
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