PEN America > Quotes

“Freud tells us that certain forms of destructiveness yield no pleasure, no satisfaction, but churn on in a nearly mechanical way, repeating without even any final satisfaction in revenge. And yet, there are, as we know, sometimes terrible satisfactions in war, the kinds of satisfaction that must be resisted. Peace is only very occasionally a quiescent state; for the most part, it is a struggle against destructiveness, the practice of resisting the terrible satisfactions of war.”
― PEN America, PEN America Issue 18: In Transit