I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to th… - Susan Sontag

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all

I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them.

To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.

My library is an archive of longings.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens — and real diseases are useful material. Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease (in the late nineteenth century: cholera, yellow fever, typhoid fever, tuberculosis). … Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor: it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable "others" and as (potentially) everyone's disease.