"The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one."
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Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 25 of 27)
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph."
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"To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement."
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"Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature."
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"The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex."
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"The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism."
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"To travel is to shop."
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"Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all."
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"To us, the difference between the # photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from # photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle."
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"[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies."
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"The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing."
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"All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no."
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"Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished."
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"Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us."
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"There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly."
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"Everything has changed and nothing is changed."
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"... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve."
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"Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals."
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"You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write."
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"There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things."
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