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Quote by Susan Sontag

“The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.”

Quote by Susan Sontag

Author

Susan Sontag was an American writer, critic, and photographer. Known for her unique literary style and profound thinking, her work spans various fields including literature, art, and politics. Born on January 16, 1933, she passed away on December 28, 2004. more

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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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Book:Illness as metaphor

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“Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.”

Two Culture Force Moral Creative Modern Jew Creator Contemporary Irony Minorities Sensibility Urban Homosexual Seriousness Outstanding Truest Pioneering

Book:A Susan Sontag reader

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“Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.”

Source: A Susan Sontag reader

“The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.”

World Way Two Problem This World Extinction Two Ways Duplication

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“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”

“Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.”

Thinking Art Interesting Obligation Great Art Aesthetics

Author:Susan Sontag

“Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.”

Looks Eye Beautiful Church Beauty Building Cameras Landscape Factories Avenues Bleak Billboards

Book:On photography

Source: On photography

“Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.”

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Book:On photography

Source: On photography

“When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.”

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“The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.”

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Author:Susan Sontag