“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
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“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. ”
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“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
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“The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”
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Susan Sontag (American writer)
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Born : January 16, 1933
Died : December 28, 2004
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American intellectual and writer best known for her essays on modern culture.
Sontag’s essays are characterized by a serious philosophical approach to various aspects and personalities of modern culture. She first came to national attention in 1964 with an essay entitled “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in which she discussed the attributes of taste within the gay community. She also wrote on such subjects as theatre and film and such figures as writer Nathalie Sarraute, director Robert Bresson, and painter Francis Bacon. In addition to criticism and fiction, she wrote screenplays and edited selected writings of Roland Barthes and Antonin Artaud. Some of her later writings and speeches were collected in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (2007).
__________
Born : January 16, 1933
Died : December 28, 2004
__________
American intellectual and writer best known for her essays on modern culture.
Sontag’s essays are characterized by a serious philosophical approach to various aspects and personalities of modern culture. She first came to national attention in 1964 with an essay entitled “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in which she discussed the attributes of taste within the gay community. She also wrote on such subjects as theatre and film and such figures as writer Nathalie Sarraute, director Robert Bresson, and painter Francis Bacon. In addition to criticism and fiction, she wrote screenplays and edited selected writings of Roland Barthes and Antonin Artaud. Some of her later writings and speeches were collected in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (2007).
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“My library is an archive of longings.”
- As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh
- As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh
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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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“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’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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“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
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“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.”
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"It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little…have few verbal means. Eloquence…thinking in words…is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech."
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"I’ve become passive. I don’t invent. I don’t yearn. I manage, I cope."
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