Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.
SUSAN SONTAGDo stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
More Susan Sontag Quotes
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.
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Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
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I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
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10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
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The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
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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.
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How boring just to be a body.
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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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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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Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
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I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
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Photographers are always imposing.
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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Wherever people feel safe – they will be indifferent.
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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
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One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.
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whatever doesn’t kill you leaves scars.
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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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.
SUSAN SONTAG