cynthia lu

“As wealth continues to flow upward, as Americans are increasingly shut out of their own democracy, as political action is constrained into online spectable, I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different... we were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity... we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“even as we are caught in a web of hurt and brokenness, we’re also in a web of healing and mercy... the power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. it’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—stong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. it has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy