Kennedy

“You will forget whoever it was that said never trust a thought that doesn't come while walking. But clutch at it. Apartments can shrink inward like drying ponds. You will gasp. Say: I am going for a walk. When he follows you to the door, buzzing at your side like a fly by a bleeding woman, add: alone. He will look surprised and hurt and you will hate him.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“For someone fortunate enough to be born wearing the boot, the capacity for mercy may well extend only to how hard one chooses to step on the neck. That anyone should take the shoe off entirely, walk from the site of the trampling, is unthinkable. (p. 172)”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“When next this happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response. (p. 24)”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Suddenly she realised Michael's significance to her period he was the one person who was detached from all this trouble; he was free of Germany. Yes, that was it, he was free - while they, every one of them, were mixed deeply in it, feeling every tremor of the giant convulsions in which it was throwing itself. You can't ever be free from what do you really belong to; a child afraid of its mother still belongs to her, is part of her initial self. So Lexa, Helmy, Elsa, Otto and all the young people in Germany felt themselves more than ever, not only a part of their country, but a part of its very thoughts and actions. (p. 179)”
― Sally Carson, ‎Crooked Cross