850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

I remember expressing amazement (+ feeling superior) when Harriet said once in Paris that she didn`t know whether or not she had been in love with someone. I couldn`t understand what she was talking about. I said that had never happened to me. Of course not. Since for me being in love is deciding: I`m in love + sticking to it, I`m always well informed.-Reborn

I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.

Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store (which may also be an airport or a museum).

If one could amputate part of one's consciousness...

I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

Every collector is potentially (if not actually) a thief.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Like other diseases that arouse feelings of shame, AIDS is often a secret, but not from the patient. A cancer diagnosis was frequently concealed from patients by their families; an AIDS diagnosis is at least as often concealed from their families by patients.