The peace of dancing minds

"There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one - an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. ...I know now more than I ever did (and I always on some level knew it) that I need that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another's - which is reading. That I need to offer the fruits of my own imaginative intelligence to another without fear of anything more deadly than disdain - which is writing."

Toni Morrison
in her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal