Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Cormier

Cormier’s line lands like a deadpan jab at the people who insist they’re protecting children while really protecting themselves. The joke is structural: we expect the “impressionable” 14-year-old to be the fragile party, the one who can’t handle a book’s discomfort. Cormier flips that assumption and exposes the real engine of censorship as adult anxiety dressed up as concern.

The intent isn’t just to defend young readers; it’s to indict the adult need to control narratives. A teenager can be shocked, bored, even rattled, but he’s rarely the one drafting a complaint letter or organizing a ban. Adults are the ones with institutional leverage: school boards, parent associations, library policies. The subtext is that censorship is less about harm and more about authority - who gets to set the moral weather, who gets to decide which emotions are permitted in public.

Cormier wrote the kinds of YA novels that refuse to flatter adolescence. The Chocolate War and its successors treat teenage life as a place where power operates brutally and without tidy lessons. That’s precisely what unsettles adults: not profanity or sex as such, but the suggestion that systems (schools, churches, families) can be hypocritical, coercive, and sometimes victorious. A 14-year-old might recognize that bleakness as honest. An adult, tasked with being the “responsible” one, may hear it as an accusation.

So the line works as both defense and diagnosis: if a book is getting “protected” out of existence, it’s usually because it hit an adult nerve - and adults have the means to make their discomfort everyone else’s problem.