The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

The story is the way the story is told.

Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.

And yet I see that though we love freedom we are mostly patient of oppression, and even refuse deliverance. I see a danger in insisting that our love of freedom always outweighs whatever force or inertia keeps us from resisting oppression and seeking deliverance. If I deny that strong, intelligent, capable people will and do accept oppression, I’m

The second American revolution, the Civil War, was an attempt to preserve slavery. It was partially successful. The institution was abolished, but the mind of the master and the mind of the slave still think a good many of the thoughts of America.

Children have a seemingly innate passion for justice; they don’t have to be taught it. They have to have it beaten out of them, in fact, to end up as properly prejudiced adults.

The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

“You have nothing to lose but your chains,” but we prefer to kiss them.

If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.

What your eyes have seen they have seen. Once you see the injustice, you can never again in good faith deny the oppression and defend the oppressor. What was loyalty is now betrayal. From now on, if you don’t resist, you collude.