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Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes

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Famous Susan Sontag Quotes

“The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the visor--all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.”

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Book:On photography
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“We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.”

ThinkingKnowsWritingMeanArtRealityLosesSpaceRoomsKnow HowFilledIntentionSmellStuckRoughAbandonedVolumeCavesArrowsTunnelsMean Words
Author:Susan Sontag
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“The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.”

WellsSelfRealitySeemsPartyDemocracyMediaCongressOfficialsMatureSovietRhetoricUnworthyCommentatorsConcealingUnanimitySanctimonious
Book:At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
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“Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.”

RealityAmericaLyingValuesCultureIdentityPoliticianFitTraditionInnovationPatternsOfficialsOpennessCooperationRhetoricDiscoursePuzzlesFamily LifeFamily Values
Book:Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung
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“Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy”

IfsThinkingWayFeelsLooksRealityFormFantasyObjectsUltimatePhotographSurfaceEncountersMultipleSpeculationInvitationsFascinationDeductionsMultiple Meanings
Book:On photography
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