Susan Sontag Quotations | Page 4

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

Love dies because its birth was an error.

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them ...

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.

Communism is fascism with a human face.

Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.