200 definitions
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Susan Sontag: top 200 quotes
200 definitions
Death (n.) is odd at second hand — when we hear many months later that someone has died, it makes a mockery of death, reducing it to news. And news is always a little unreal which is why we bear to take in so much of it.
Death (n.) is the obscene mystery to those without religious consolations or without a sense of its naturalness. For such people it becomes the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
The Aphorism (n.) is a historically-colored voice which, when adopted, inevitably suggests certain attitudes. Aphoristic thinking is impatient thinking: by its very brevity or concentratedness, it presupposes a superior standard.
The Aphorism (n.) teaches us the sameness of wisdom as anthropology teaches us the diversity of culture.
The Aphorism (n.) is a mode of thinking that constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast, and move on.
The Aphorism (n.) is aristocratic thinking, demanding that you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details.
The Aphorism (n.) is a kind of impatient thinking: by its very brevity or concentratedness, it presupposes a superior standard.
The Aphorism (n.) is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that.
An Aphorism (n.) is not an argument. The reader is expected to get it fast, and move on.
The Work of art (n.) is a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open an denriched.
The Work of art (n.) is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. It is not only about something... it is something.
The Work of art (n.) has the capacity to make us nervous... a capacity tamed by interpretation in that it makes art manageable, conformable.
The Work of art (n.) , before theory, knew no need to justify itself. One did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.
The Work of art's (n.) most potent element is often the silences.
The Work of art (n.) , when great, contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
The Work of art (n.) is, when great, not obligated to be continually interesting.
The Work of art (n.) is not primarily its content, but the habit of approaching art in order to interpret it sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.
A Work of art (n.) should not have to justify itself. It should not have to ask what it says because one knows what it does.
Peace (n.) is that which most people really mean victory, the victory of their side.
The Critic (n.) is tasked with the important job of savaging what is mediocre or meretricious.
Intelligence (n.) is a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
A Thing (n.) is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
The Photograph (n.) is a grammar and an ethics of seeing.
The Photograph (n.) is a furnisher of evidence. Something seems proven when we're shown a photograph of something we have heard about or doubt.
A Photograph (n.) is a piece of evidence in an ongoing biography of history. Unlike one painting, one photograph implies that there will be others.
The Photograph (n.) is a trace rather than a construction but it is not a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose... to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.
A Photograph (n.) is a way of imprisoning reality. . . One can't possess reality, one can possess images-- one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.
The Photograph (n.) is an object which fiddles with the scale of the word, packaging it, and itself inviting being packed itself, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides.
The Photograph (n.) is as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.
The Photograph (n.) is both a looting and a preservation, a denunciation and consecration.
A Photograph (n.) is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. It is an incitement to revery like a wood fire in a room. This is especially true of those photographs of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past.
The Photograph (n.) is insofar as it acts as a necessary confirmation or enhancement of experience, a component of our of aesthetic consumerism and addiction and an example of how industrial societies have mentally polluted their citizens and turned them into image-junkies.
The Photograph (n.) is less a statement about the world so much as a piece of it, a miniature of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
The Photograph (n.) is like a quotation, or a maxim, or a proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
A Photograph (n.) is more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.
The Photograph (n.) is not merely something through which people remember... it is that only the photograph is remembered.
A Photograph (n.) is not only an interpretation of the real. It is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
The Photograph (n.) is not simply a recording, but it has become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.
A Photograph (n.) is quite unlike life, a significant detail that is illuminated by a flash and fixed forever.
The Photograph (n.) is responsible for teaching us a new visual code. It alters and enlarges our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. Photographs are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.
The Photograph (n.) is so dominant a mode of representation that one might rewrite mallarme's famed statement on the book with the phrase: Today everything exist to end in a photograph.
A Photograph (n.) shocks insofar as it shows something novel.
Interpretation (n.) is a highly dubious practice which makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
Interpretation (n.) is a radical strategy for deviously altering a text without actually erasing or rewriting it. But he can't admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.
Interpretation (n.) is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities.
Interpretation (n.) itself must be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts it is a liberating act, in others it is reactionary, cowardly and stifling.
Interpretation (n.) is the wrongheaded revenge of the intellect upon the world. It intends to impoverish and to deplete the world in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings' it is to turn the world into 'this world.
Interpretation (n.) is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Interpretation (n.) is a kind of arrogance. What is needed is a vocabulary a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary for forms.
Interpretation (n.) is a thing first introduced in the context of scientific Enlightenment and was summoned to reconcile ancient texts, no longer deemed acceptable, to 'modern' demands. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can't admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.
Interpretation (n.) is a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation.
Interpretation (n.) is a historical result of reconciling the ancient texts to “modern” demands, of secularizing religious symbols and focusing on the demands of the reader over the content of the text.
Interpretation (n.) is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it.
Interpretation (n.) is able to be eluded by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be ... just what it is.
Interpretation (n.) is always indicative of a a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.
Interpretation (n.) is an attempt to make art manageable, conformable.
Communism (n.) is fascism with a human face.