Adrian Hernandez

“You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness.What she and others like her were allowed was a kind of passive bereavement, the right to pose for newspaper photographs holding framed pictures of their dead relations in their hands, the right to march in boisterous but toothless parades, the right to call for an end to bloodshed as though bloodshed were some pest or vagrant who could be evicted or run out of town. As long as she adhered to those rules, moved within those margins, she remained worthy of grand, public sympathy.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“I’m starting to think,” he eventually continued, “that maybe we leave parts of ourselves behind in certain situations—some essential piece of ourselves that we have to cut off, otherwise there’s no way out. The future becomes a kind of journey to discover what you might actually have left behind and what you’re supposed to do about it. It’s more than trauma. It’s like a phantom limb, but with a piece of your soul.”
― Derek B. Miller, The Girl in Green

“He is my friend.” “Nobody ever gets betrayed by their enemy.”
― Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf