lils

“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption in hindsight of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. While the terrible thing is happening, while the land is still being stolen, and the natives still being killed, any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight. I tell stories for a living and there’s a thick thread of narrative by well-meaning white Westerners that exalts the native populations in so many parts of the world for standing up to the occupiers. Makes of their narrative a neat, reflexive arc in which it was always understood by the colonized and, this part implied, the descendants of the colonizer, that what happened was wrong.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The future could not be predicted, and the shape of things could not be divined. To think otherwise was absurd. But they were young that morning and they could cling to hope. Hope that the world could be remade kinder and sweeter.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

“Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human - the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion