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Susan Sontag

16 January 1933-28 December 2004

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911 is not a cowardly act on civilization, liberty, or humanity, but a monstrous dose of reality: An attack undertaken as a response to American actions.

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Admiration is practiced well when the admirer accepts, as his last achievement, the filling up of the space opened by what is admired.

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Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny. . . It is also her vulnerability.

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Aging is marked by regret. 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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The Anthropologist is a (highly masculine) intellectual who successfully lives out the desire of all contemporary intellectuals for a dialectic self-identification with the other.

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The Apocalypse's being made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality and to our humanity.

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Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit).

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Art is a genre with the capacity to evade interpretation and make us nervous. Interpretation tames art.

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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.

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Art is not only about something, it is something.

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Art is understood and valued as an 'absolute' activity. So long as that is the case, it will be a separate, elitist, 'priestly' one presupposing the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear and then sent away.

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Art has the capacity to make us nervous and interpretation is an attempt to tame that nervousness, to make it manageable or comfortable.

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Attention is vitality — It connects one with others and makes one eager.

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Beauty is defined precisely as that which cannot be defined, or 'the ineffable'.

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Beauty is reminiscent of nature as such, of what lies beyond the human and the created. It thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.