Grace

“Disasters, he proposed, create a "community of sufferers" that allow individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

“An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men".”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“A modern soldier returning from combat---or a survivor of Sarajevo---goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families ae isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good. Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society---and they're nearly miraculous---the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging