"Perversity is the muse of modern literature."
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Susan Sontag quotes (page 2 of 27)
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"I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD."
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"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."
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"Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours."
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"All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears."
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"A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding."
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"In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings."
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"I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence."
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"Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties"
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"Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage."
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"I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation."
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"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."
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"10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction."
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"Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism."
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"Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material."
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"Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas."
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"Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it."
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"It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin."
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"The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own."
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"The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied."
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