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Susan Sontag Quotes


A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

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.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

"Camp" is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

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.

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.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.