Naoufel Testaouni

“Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you'd know it's a flood.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Safety is, I believe, an inherently classed, raced, and gendered experience that frequently runs the risk of being used for regressive ends—ironically, for restricting the freedoms of the vulnerable, those who are never really safe. Often, we see the call for safety actually reinforce the power of oppressive institutions, like the police and the prison system, in our lives. When we choose safety over liberation, our movements fail.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

“When you’re a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological deprivation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is out of your control (since the problem is not that you’re unloved and deprived; it’s that you’re Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

“When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.”
― George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America