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That Tendency Of Social Thought To Generalize, To Describe A Leading Tendency In A Society In Such A Way That It Seems That Everything Falls Within Its Iron Laws, Is Very Common. Of Course Our Own Experience Tells Us That Life Is Not As Monochrome As These Thinkers Depict It. On The Other Hand They Are Very Valuable Because They Alert Us To Transformations We Are Likely To Take For Granted.

-Susan Sontag

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That Tendency Of Social

Susan Sontag

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That Tendency Of Social Thought To Generalize, To Describe A Leading Tendency In A Society In Such A Way That It Seems That Everything Falls Within Its Iron Laws, Is Very Common. Of Course Our Own Experience Tells Us That Life Is Not As Monochrome As These Thinkers Depict It. On The Other Hand They Are Very Valuable Because They Alert Us To Transformations We Are Likely To Take For Granted.

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Funny Graduation

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Circulatory System

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Literature Usually Begets Literature.

All Struggle, All Resistance Is -- Must Be -- Concrete. And All Struggle Has A Global Resonance. If Not Here, Then There. If Not Now, Then Soon. Elsewhere As Well As Here.

What Interests Me Is To Understand The Nature Of The Modern.

Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

The Particular Qualities And Intentions Of Photographs Tend To Be Swallowed Up In The Generalized Pathos Of Time Past.

Art Is A Form Of Consciousness.

I Think That There Is Generally Less Of A Community And That The Fragmentation Of The Left Is A Symptom. I Think That It Is Less And Less Possible To Take For Granted Certain Cultural References.

Growing Older Is Mainly An Ordeal Of The Imagination-a Moral Disease, A Social Pathology.

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Many Things In The World Have Not Been Named; And Many Things, Even If They Have Been Named, Have Never Been Described.

In Most Modern Instances, Interpretation Amounts To The Philistine Refusal To Leave The Work Of Art Alone. Real Art Has The Capacity To Make Us Nervous. By Reducing The Work Of Art To Its Content And Then Interpreting That, One Tames The Work Of Art. Interpretation Makes Art Manageable, Conformable.

The Basic Unit For Contemporary Art Is Not The Idea, But The Analysis Of And Extension Of Sensations.

The Camera Makes Everyone A Tourist In Other People's Reality, And Eventually In One's Own.

Ours Is An Age Which Consciously Pursues Health, And Yet Only Believes In The Reality Of Sickness.

One Set Of Messages Of The Society We Live In Is: Consume. Grow. Do What You Want. Amuse Yourselves. The Very Working Of This Economic System, Which Has Bestowed These Unprecedented Liberties, Most Cherished In The Form Of Physical Mobility And Material Prosperity, Depends On Encouraging People To Defy Limits.

Surrealism Is A Bourgeois Disaffection; That Its Militants Thought It Universal Is Only One Of The Signs That It Is Typically Bourgeois.

The Aim Of All Commentary On Art Now Should Be To Make Works Of Art - And, By Analogy, Our Own Experience - More, Rather Than Less, Real To Us. The Function Of Criticism Should Be To Show How It Is What It Is, Even That It Is What It Is, Rather Than To Show What It Means.

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Art Today Is A New Kind Of Instrument, An Instrument For Modifying Consciousness And Organizing New Modes Of Sensibility . . . . Artists Have Had To Become Self-conscious Aestheticians: Continually Challenging Their Means, Their Materials And Methods.

Photography Is A Kind Of Overstatement, A Heroic Copulation With The Material World.

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My Skull Is Crammed With Quotations.

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Sight Is A Promiscuous Sense. The Avid Gaze Always Wants More.

Talking Like Touching. Writing Like Punching Somebody.

Writing Is Finally A Series Of Permissions You Give Yourself To Be Expressive In Certain Ways. To Leap. To Fly. To Fail.

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Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.

If There Can Be A Better Way For The Real World To Include The One Of Images, It Will Require An Ecology Not Only Of Real Things But Of Images As Well.

I'm More Cautious About What I Write.

I Have Been Told That I Am A "natural" Feminist, Someone Who Was Born A Feminist. In Fact I Was Quite Blind To What The Problem Was: I Couldn't Understand Why Anyone Would Hesitate To Do What They Wanted To Do Just Because They Were Told That Women Didn't Do Such Things.

Knowing A Great Deal About What Is In The World Art, Catastrophe, The Beauties Of Nature Through Photographic Images, People Are Frequently Disappointed, Surprised, Unmoved When The See The Real Thing. For Photographic Images Tend To Subtract Feeling From Something We Experience At First Hand And The Feelings They Do Arouse Are, Largely, Not Those We Have In Real Life. Often Something Disturbs Us More In Photographed Form Than It Does When We Actually Experience It.

The Question Of The Social Uses Of Photography Opens Out Into The Very Largest Issues Of The Self, Of The Relationship To Community, To Reality.

Books Are Funny Little Portable Pieces Of Thought.

We Fret About Words, We Writers. Words Mean. Words Point. They Are Arrows. Arrows Stuck In The Rough Hide Of Reality. And The More Portentous, More General The Word, The More They Can Also Resemble Rooms Or Tunnels. They Can Expand, Or Cave In. They Can Come To Be Filled With A Bad Smell. They Will Often Remind Us Of Other Rooms, Where We'd Rather Dwell Or Where We Think We Are Already Living. They Can Be Spaces We Lose The Art Or The Wisdom Of Inhabiting. And Eventually Those Volumes Of Mental Intention We No Longer Know How To Inhabit Will Be Abandoned, Boarded Up, Closed Down.

Authoritarian Political Ideologies Have A Vested Interest In Promoting Fear, A Sense Of The Imminence Of Takeover By Aliens And Real Diseases Are Useful Material.

A Large Part Of The Popularity And Persuasiveness Of Psychology Comes From Its Being A Sublimated Spiritualism: A Secular, Ostensibly Scientific Way Of Affirming The Primacy Of "spirit" Over Matter.

I Believe That Courage Is Morally Neutral. I Can Well Imagine Wicked People Being Brave And Good People Being Timid Or Afraid. I Don't Consider It A Moral Virtue.

That's What A Community Is: Taking For Granted Certain Assumptions, Not Having To Start From Zero Every Time. This Is No Longer True.

Everyone Who Lives In An Industrialized Society Is Obliged Gradually To Give Up The Past, But In Certain Countries, Such As The United States And Japan, The Break With The Past Has Been Particularly Traumatic.

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George Saunders

Patrick J. Kennedy

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