"Real art has the capacity to make us nervous."
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Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 3 of 27)
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling."
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"The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster."
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"Lying is the most simple form of self-defence."
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"Photographers are always imposing"
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"Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood."
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"Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future."
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"Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment."
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"My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything."
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"The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes."
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"Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing."
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"Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person."
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"There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera."
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"How boring just to be a body."
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"To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production."
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"To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time."
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"The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification."
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"The painter constructs, the photographer discloses."
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"The white race is the cancer of human history."
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"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
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