Stefan Jonasson

“I can’t read books anymore,” I hear him say. “When I was a boy I read a lot, but then I stopped with the war.” He hesitates again. “It takes only one sentence to blow up a village. Two sentences to destroy the world.”
― Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Hotel Silence

“We need to calculate the damage caused by the people who profit from war and make them pay for it,” I hear her continue. “That way they would understand that war is much more expensive than peace. In any case, the only language they understand is money,” she adds.”
― Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Hotel Silence

“If one has known poverty and suffering – not that genteel poverty of slender purse and shabby carpets – but the brutal poverty where the larder is oft-times empty, and where the frost lines the wall of one’s humble dwelling; then indeed it would seem that only love alone keeps the blood from congealing, then it is not so hard to understand the courage and endurance of the pioneer.”
― Laura Goodman Salverson

“I remember one time we were walking into a grocery store and an old man was ringing a bell for the Salvation Army. I asked my dad if we could give him some money and he told me no, that he works hard for his money and he wasn’t about to let me give it away. He said it isn’t his fault that other people don’t want to work. He spent the whole time we were in the grocery store telling me about how people take advantage of the government and until the government stops helping those people by giving them handouts, the problem won’t ever go away… I believed him. That was three years ago and all this time I thought homeless people were homeless because they were lazy or drug addicts or just didn’t want to work like other people. But now I know that’s not true. Sure, some of what he said was true to an extent, but he was using the worst-case scenarios. Not everyone is homeless because they choose to be. They’re homeless because there isn’t enough help to go around. And people like my father are the problem. Instead of helping others, people use the worst-case scenarios to excuse their own selfishness and greed.”
― Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us