Taylor Wirkus

“One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting.

But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it's our children killed: Remember. And it may seem now like it's someone else's children, but there's no such thing as someone else's children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one's own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.”
― Suleika Jaouad, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life

“It is a disorienting thing, to keep a ledger of atrocity, to write the ugliness of each day as it happens. The months smother the months, soon the years will smother the years. Killing that might have once made front-page news slowly submit to the law of diminish returns- what is left to say but more dead, more dead?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“reality, what is happening is the opposite of an embrace. It’s a shoving aside of the present system, a system that makes it more and more clear there is no future, no community, for this or any other generation to come. Only endless taking—and if these young people must pay for it by forfeiting hope or possibility or clean air or a livable planet, so be it. A system more petulant and intransigent than any protester who ever lived. A system that can only ever say: There is nothing better than this.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This