Susan Sontag - Illness as Metaphor (1978)

18 Sourced Quotes

View all Susan Sontag Quotes
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

Susan Sontag
Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

Susan Sontag
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

Susan Sontag
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

Susan Sontag
In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.

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

Susan Sontag
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. 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.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

Susan Sontag
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by willpower are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.

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

Susan Sontag
Depression is melancholy minus its charms — the animation, the fits.

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

Susan Sontag