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

“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

“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

“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