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

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

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

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.
Susan Sontag

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

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

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

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

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

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.
Susan Sontag


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.
Susan Sontag

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
Susan Sontag

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

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

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

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.
Susan Sontag

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.
Susan Sontag

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.
Susan Sontag

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

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