American - Author | January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004
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
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
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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.
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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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.
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
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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.
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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