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"Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize."
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"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."

"You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet, because poetry is beyond hooks and holes."

"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."

"Music heals all forms of misery."

"The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels."

"The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag


"It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin."


"Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims."


"Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one."


"I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future."


"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."


"Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don't have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up-up, up. And down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I'm on my feet again. See, I'm starting to roll it up again. Don't try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock."


"The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both."
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