Shirley

“I think of a line that has always stayed with me, from Marwa Helal's "poem for brad who wants me to write about the pyramids."
"This is where the poets will interject. They will say show- dont tell. But that assumes most people can see."

It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit- exclaim, even- that no description of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it. At the very least, one should not be able to have it both ways. One should not, with a modicum of self-respect, quote Morrison and Baldwin at every turn, but then, faced with the sort of injustice with which so much of their work contends, suddenly retreat into descriptions of whatever it is the finches are doing. What is this work we do? What are we good for?
The literary critic Northup Frye once said, "all art is metaphor. And the metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity. Our derangement. The plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul. One's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot, in any rational way, be understood. Only felt. Only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque- what we do to one another so grotesque- that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“I'm worried I'll be mad forever."
"Then be mad forever," Bertie said.
He sounded unsure. "But I have so much anger."
"Because much has been done upon you," Sofie said. "The Nazis have made us scared of anger, made us believe that anger is bad. Anger is not bad. Anger is how we tell ourselves that we've been wronged, that we've been mistreated, and that it's not okay. Anger is a beautiful emotion. We just need to express it properly.”
― Milo Todd, The Lilac People

“his study of history, he had learned about the leaders, and the various groups involved, but he had somehow missed this fact about every single person: that they held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe. And he understood that it could make a person lonely; people had to take and give to one another whatever they could. If it was not enough…Well, then it meant one just had to be a grownup.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say

“(at Guantanamo) Whatever crimes they might have been accused of...if they didn't hate the west before decades of their life were taken from them, mustn't they hate it now? What is the statute of limitations on resentment? On rage? On revenge?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This