…the war goes on — an ache in the bones, an ache in the gut, an ache in the heart. - Susan Sontag

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits. Appetite is supposed to be immoderate. The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty — of the indefinite expansion of possibility. Virtually every kind of advocacy claims to offer first of all or also some increment of freedom. Not every freedom, to be sure. In rich countries, freedom has come to be identified more and more with “personal fulfillment” — a freedom enjoyed or practiced alone (or as alone). Hence much of recent discourse about the body, reimagined as the instrument with which to enact, increasingly, various programs of self-improvement, of the heightening of powers.