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Susan Sontag Quotes and Quotations
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism. The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. Life is not about significant details, illuminated in a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. 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. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser. It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe-though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived. Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. Although none of the rules for becoming alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them. Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. |