All this lying to and by cancer patients is a measure of how much harder it has become in advanced industrial societies to come to terms with death.
-- Susan Sontag (Chapter One)

Importance: In this quote, Sontag introduces one of her core themes – that an increasing preoccupation with illness in modern society has corresponded with an increasing discomfort with death. Due to medical and technological advancements, life expectancy has greatly increased in modern times; disease, suffering, and death, is far more removed from the lived experience of the typical person (particularly the typical American or European, as Sontag mainly focuses on these places in her book). While this increase in life expectancy is obviously a positive development in our world, Sontag identifies it as a driving force in the stigmatization of illness. Illness forces people to come to terms with the fragility of life. Notably, Sontag focuses on people who are not ill themselves, and...