Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Susan SontagRead
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the interplay of masculine and feminine qualities in beauty.
Susan Sontag's quote suggests that the essence of beauty transcends traditional gender attributes, indicating that men can embody feminine traits that enhance their beauty, while women can possess masculine traits that do the same. This perspective challenges conventional notions of gender by emphasizing the fluidity and intersection of masculine and feminine qualities in defining attractiveness.
In practice
This quote can inspire a discussion on gender roles in art classes.
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
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.
People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.
Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.
My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought that and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).
We're left with so little to go on. Only the present is full enough to seem complete, and even that is an optical illusion. The moment is bleeding off the page. We live on the precipice of our perceptions. At the edge of every living instant, the world shears away like a cliff of ice into the sea of what is forgotten.
I planted my self in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast about me, upon which the Sun so violently darted his Rays, that the Heat, which attracted them, as it does the thickest Clouds, carried me up so high, that at length I found my self above the middle Region of the Air.
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