Quotes from Susan Sontag

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

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.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

On Photography "Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself

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.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

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

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents' pots and pans, the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

TB [tuberculosis] was a disease in the service of a romantic view of the world. Cancer is now in the service of a simplistic view of the world that can turn paranoid.

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.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

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

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

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