Kennedy

“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

“You look up at his face, with the orange and brown lines and the glue patches, and realize: He doesn't understand you've planned your lives together. That you have even planned your deaths together, not really deaths at all but more like a pas de deux. Like Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in An American in Paris, only older.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“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