Kennedy

“One day this will end. In liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history. It’ll end when sanctions pule up high enough, or the political cost of occupation and apartheid proves debilitating. When finally there is no other means of preserving self-interest but to act, the powerful will act. The same people who did the killing and financed the killing and justified the killing and turned away from the killing will congratulate themselves on doing the right thing. It is very important to do the right thing, eventually. (p. 182)”
― 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

“And I wondered if maybe there is a version of me living back in Syria who still loves the rain; who wears a hijab, speaks Arabic, volunteers with paramedics and spends her time learning to play the piano while her cat purrs in her lap. Perhaps for every Syrian who left the country, there is an alternative version of them resuming the life they had before the war. And as long as those versions of us are still alive, we'll never find peace.”
― Suad Aldarra, I Don't Want to Talk About Home