Sontag

Found 69 items. Pages: 1 2 >>

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(1097 votes)  Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(762 votes)  What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(749 votes)  Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(716 votes)  Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(690 votes)  A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(395 votes)  AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(382 votes)  AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(365 votes)  Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(359 votes)  It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(340 votes)  The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(330 votes)  American ''energy'' is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(329 votes)  Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(301 votes)  The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(289 votes)  The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(279 votes)  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. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(266 votes)  Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(266 votes)  In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(264 votes)  Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(264 votes)  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.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(261 votes)  It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe --though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(259 votes)  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.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(258 votes)  Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been -- what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal -- needs to be protected from people.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(258 votes)  In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(257 votes)  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.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(257 votes)  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.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(257 votes)  A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of ''spirit'' over matter.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(255 votes)  Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(251 votes)  Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(250 votes)  What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being -- while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. Normally we don't experience, at least don't want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(249 votes)  A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(249 votes)  I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(249 votes)  Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(248 votes)  Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(247 votes)  The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(245 votes)  It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(245 votes)  Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(245 votes)  Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(245 votes)  Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(245 votes)  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.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(243 votes)  The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects --making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(242 votes)  The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(240 votes)  In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(240 votes)  Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(237 votes)  The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(236 votes)  The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(233 votes)  Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(232 votes)  We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(229 votes)  Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(225 votes)  For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(220 votes)  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.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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Found 69 items. Pages: 1 2 >>