Andrew

“Almost all these [Amerindian] societies took pride in their ability to adopt children or captives – even from among those whom they considered the most benighted of their neighbours – and, through care and education, turn them into what they considered to be proper human beings. Slaves, it follows, were an anomaly: people who were neither killed nor adopted, but who hovered somewhere in between; abruptly and violently suspended in the midpoint of a process that should normally lead from prey to pet to family. As such, the captive as slave becomes trapped in the role of ‘caring for others’, a non-person whose work is largely directed towards enabling those others to become persons, warriors, princesses, ‘human beings’ of a particularly valued and special kind.

As these examples show, if we want to understand the origins of violent domination in human societies, this is precisely where we need to look. Mere acts of violence are passing; acts of violence transformed into caring relations have a tendency to endure.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“...but personally, he could never be anywhere without sooner or later wanting to go somewhere else... Likewise he had never been able to build anything permanent with other human beings.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“The first thing every neophyte must understand is that God, whatever he is, has nothing in common with humankind, and that he remains so far away as to be completely inaccessible to the human senses. The same is true of his intentions. At no point will people ever learn what he is up to.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

“civilization: tears shed for a fictional spider and a
fictional pig, rather than for a child who nearly got slaughtered like a pig”
― Yiyun Li, Wednesday's Child: Stories