"Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology."
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Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 11 of 27)
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place."
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"My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another."
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"The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more."
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"What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment."
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"War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins."
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"Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are."
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"Rules of taste enforce structures of power."
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"The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence."
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"War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive."
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"Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas."
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"To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content."
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"One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious."
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"Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards."
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"Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others."
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"To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing."
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"In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed."
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"One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much."
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"I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard."
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"The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still."
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