Susan Sontag Quotes
An American author, philosopher, literary theorist, and political activist.
(1933 - 2004)
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"Camp" is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
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A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
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A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
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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.
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Although none of the rules for becoming alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
[Positive]
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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
[Ambition]
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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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.
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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.
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Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
[The Present]
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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.
[Acceptance]
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He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
[Self Acceptance]
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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.
[America]
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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.
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I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
[Attention]
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