Susan Sontag

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

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

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

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

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.

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.

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

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.