Briana Almengor

“A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered...And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything...Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love....God should be both. If a god isn't, that is no God.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“You had to try to hang on to your name, though nobody cared about your name. You had to try and stay a person. You had to try not to become invisible. If you let go and fell back into the chaos you were gone, just a number in a unit, which was also a number. If you died, no one knew. If you gave up and disintegrated inside, no one knew.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I did not understand the point of the word genocide then. I resent and revile it now. The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate, cool and sterile when it needs to be gruesome. The word is hollow, true but disingenuous, a performance, the worst kind of lie. It cannot do justice--it is not meant to do justice--to the thing it describes.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“The word genocide is clinical, overly general, bloodless, and dehumanizing.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After