Haley Young

“Between us, we have the fire and the water. I'm quite sure that together, we can take on the wind.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“I know the vision you dreamed of for this nation and I know I may have destroyed it. But my first obligation is not to the unborn people of this country's future, but the people who are suffering now, who pass their days in fear because of the war that you have brought to their doorstep.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“Jiko: "Surfer, wave, same thing."

"That's just stupid, " I said. " A surfer's a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?"

Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. "A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean. A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“According to one scholar, the “ideal victim” in the Troubles was someone who was not a combatant, but a passive civilian. To many, Jean McConville was the perfect victim: a widow, a mother of ten. To others, she was not a victim at all, but a combatant by proxy, who courted her own fate. Of course, even if one were to concede, for the sake of argument, that McConville was an informer, there is no moral universe in which her murder and disappearance should be justified. Must it be the case that how one perceives a tragedy will forever depend on where one sits? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.” When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as “whataboutery” took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone would say, What about Bloody Sunday? To which you could say, What about Bloody Friday? To which they could say, What about Pat Finucane? What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre? What about Enniskillen? What about McGurk’s bar? What about. What about. What about.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland