850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

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

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.

[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

Art is seduction, not rape.

And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.