Burn This Book Quotes

“A writer's life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity.”
― Toni Morrison, Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word

“Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.”
― Toni Morrison, Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement

“Better not to feel too much until the crisis ends—and if it never ends, at least we’ll have suffered a little less, developed a useful dullness, protected ourselves as much as we could with a little indifference, a little repression, a little deliberate blindness, and a large dose of self-anesthetics. The constant—and very real—fear of being hurt, the fear of death, of intolerable loss, or even of “mere” humiliation, leads each of us, the citizens and prisoners of the conflict, to dampen our own vitality, our emotional and intellectual range, and to cloak ourselves in more and more protective layers until we suffocate.”
― Toni Morrison, Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word