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Susan Sontag Quotes

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"Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs."

"Sanity is a cozy lie."

"He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser."

"Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are."

""Camp" is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated."

"Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone."

"The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both."

"The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes."

"It is not the position, but the disposition."

"Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it."

"What we need is to use what we have."

"The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions."

"What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."

"The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own."

"Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics."

"In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it."

"It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel."

"To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."

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

"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."

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