Pjes

“It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

“Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others