Searching for the self when I was entirely alone was hazardous. What if I found not so much a great emptiness as a space full of unpleasant contents, a compound of long-hidden truths, closeted, buried, forgotten. When I went looking, I was playing a desperate game of hide-and-seek, fearful of what I might find, most afraid that I would find nothing.

Old age is somewhat like dieting. Every day there is less of us to be observed.

A hand up is worthier than one's own fist grasping a higher rung of the ladder.

We were determined by public opinions of us. Would we think we existed without outside confirmation? And how long would we live apart from others before we began to doubt our existence?

These short stories establish Sontag's originality . . . her unique vision, her success with experiments in the form . . . Sontag makes a wonderful stew of the past, the life caught in memory and imagination, serves it all up lavishly laced with silences, and provides us with a gourmand's series of short courses.

The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.

What others regard as retreat from them or rejection of them is not those things at all but instead a breeding ground for greater friendship, a culture for deeper involvement, eventually, with them.