Quotes by Susan Sontag

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.

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.

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.