Kennedy

“From the moment that those running footsteps had come clamoring towards her, Lexa for the first time this summer was wide awake. The last warning of the peril in which she and Moritz stood had thundered its way into her consciousness with that sudden impetuous knocking. It had shaken her out of the quiet, doped state where actions and thoughts had been largely instinctive, were all reactions were mercifully numbed. (p. 316-317)”
― Sally Carson, ‎Crooked Cross

“Active resistance – showing up to protests and speaking out and working to make change even at the smallest levels, the school boards and town councils – matters. Negative resistance – refusing to participate when the act of participation falls below one’s moral threshold – matters. And yet there are days when both negative and active resistance feel pointless. A political system that won’t restrict firearms even after a shooter massacres classrooms full of children, a system that shrugs when a regime murders and dismembers a journalist because that regime controls an inordinate amount of oil, a system that won’t flinch at the images of starving babies when it has the power to save their lives – what manner of resistance can’t such a system learn to abide? What use is any of it, what use?

But there is a use, always. The first is outward: every derailment of normalcy matters when what’s becoming normal is a genocide. It doesn’t take much: by the standards of Western normalcy, where the possibility of a missile landing on one’s / house or a military sniper murdering one’s children is so implausible as to be indistinguishable from science fiction, even minimal incontinence is tantamount to apocalypse. The second is inward: every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one’s eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come. One builds the muscle by walking away from the most minor things – trivial consumables, the cultural work of monsters, the myriad material fruits grown on stolen ground – and realizes in the doing of these things that there is a wide spectrum of negative resistance. Maybe it’s not all that much trouble to avoid ordering coffee and downloading apps and buying chocolate-flavored hummus from companies that abide slaughter. (p. 166-167)”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Too much and too sudden power makes men lose all sense of proportion; blood turns such men into madmen.”
― Sally Carson, ‎Crooked Cross

“She forgot the red and white flag which flew out bright in the morning sky against the chimney pots, and she forgot the hurried conversations, the shouts, the frightened beating of her own heart. She forgot for one precious moment the screams, the blood, the waiting terror. She forgot Germany and the slow stain that was creepy and cross it to the south, to midsummer, to her own heart.

Somewhere beyond her at lay, waiting, unchallenged, forgotten behind the mountains. At any moment she might become frighteningly aware it: at any moment it might awake and remember her and surge towards her, touching her, carrying her with it. (p. 313)”
― Sally Carson, ‎Crooked Cross