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

—  Susan Sontag

Review of Selected Essays http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13783 by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963)
Context: Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

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Susan Sontag 168
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist 1933–2004

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