“Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn. If the world were peaceful, we would never put up with this kind of ruinous expenditure on arms at the cost of our own lives. This is where the thousands of CIA destabilizations begin to make a macabre kind of economic sense. They function to kill people who never were our enemies-that’s not the problem-but to leave behind, for each one of the dead, perhaps five loved ones who are now traumatically conditioned to violence and hostility toward the United States. This insures that the world will continue to be a violent place, populates with contras and Cuban exiles and armies in Southeast Asia, justifying the endless, profitable production of arms to ‘defend’ ourselves in such a violent world”

“Adults don’t like it when children point out that they might be wrong. We have a tendency to say, as does one of Dahl’s great villains, “I'm right and you're wrong, I'm big and you're small, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

If Morrison is unhappy to see young adult literature exploding the pieties of his generation and pointing to the flaws in their plans, he is supposed to be. He’s not the audience. He’s the guy at the head of the classroom lecturing about what’s good for you, and young adult literature is the wisecracking kid who just stole his audience. Perhaps if Morrison were not so unthinkingly certain that he is right and young adult fiction is wrong, that he is big and they are small, there might be something he could learn from these novels. Maybe there are some lessons in these books about the fears and the hopes of the generation that is growing up while we watch.”