Bothayna Al-Essa > Quotes

“He’d come to understand that they weren't waging a war against books, they were waging a war against reading.”
― Bothayna Al-Essa

“HUMAN EXISTENCE IS SUFFERING. THE ROOT OF SUFFERING IS DESIRE. THE ROOT OF DESIRE IS IMAGINATION.”
― Bothayna Al-Essa, The Book Censor's Library

“You can all tolerate ugliness, tolerate child abuse and rape, you can tolerate cursing and swearing, domestic violence, racism, you can tolerate Israel, America, your sectarianism, government corruption, underage marriage, everything! You can tolerate all the garbage in the world but you can't tolerate a poem.”
― Bothayna Al-Essa, All That I Want to Forget

“The balance of the world goes horribly askew when a story is confiscated; it becomes a darker, more ominous place.”
― Bothayna Al-Essa

“Because they’re changing the past, and we need to protect our collective memory. That way, when this world falls, as it’s destined to do so, we’ll have somewhere to start from.”
― Bothayna Al-Essa

“Writing is a glue;
It pulls me together,
Saves me just in time,
And leaves me to perish.”
― Bothayna Al-Essa, All That I Want to Forget

“Before, an invisible line - something like the equator - had separated the real from the imaginary, but after that book, the line ceased to exist.”
― Bothayna Al-Essa

“He knew that he was caught in the throat of a word that would never utter him, a word that he, too, would never let past his lips.”
― Bothayna Al-Essa, The Book Censor's Library

“He’d come to understand that they weren’t waging a war against books so much as a war against reading. Reading was a bad habit, but you couldn’t keep people from doing it, just as you couldn’t keep them from smoking or having sex. All you could do was limit their options, give them the illusion of choice. Then, all on their own, they would turn away. In the future, he and the other censors wouldn’t need to ban any books—no one would read them anyway. It was as if he could see the future of humankind in a crystal ball.”
― Bothayna Al-Essa, The Book Censor's Library