Grace

“It isn’t the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up,” Leonel once said, “it is numbness, acquiescence, and the defeat of the mind. Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.” He also said that what destroys a society, a state, a government, is corruption—that, and the use of force, which is always applied against those who have not been convinced or included. He was always talking about corruption: trying to prevent it, expose it, eradicate it. He was dedicated to the task of bringing the sin to the eye. “This is the stage of denunciation,” he said, “which precedes the revolutionary moment.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“You are always asking me why the people don’t do something, why they put up with this brutality, why they don’t rise up against it, this and that. Okay. You’re exhausted, you’re shocked, you’re sick to your stomach, and you feel dirty. These things are what people feel every day here—and you expect them to get themselves organized? You expect them to fight back? Could you fight back at this moment?”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous