Emily

“Everything we know of horror and dread is connected primarily with war. Stalin's Gulags and Auschwitz were recent gains for evil. History has always been the story of wars and military commanders, and war was, we could say, the yardstick of horror. This is why people muddle the concepts of war and disaster. In Chernobyl, we see all the hallmarks of war: hordes of soldiers, evacuation, abandoned houses. The course of life disrupted. Reports on Chernobyl in the newspapers are thick with the language of war: 'nuclear', 'explosion', 'heroes'. And this makes it harder to appreciate that we now find ourselves on a new page of history. The history of disasters has begun. But people do not want to reflect on that, because they have never thought about it before, preferring to take refuge in the familiar. And in the past. Even the monuments to the Chernobyl heroes look like war memorials.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“What happens before birth and resumes after death - this is more real than the brief spark of life. Out lives just carry the physical burden of carrying energy forward. We put on suits of meat as training, as a challenge. We all know this is temporary.”
― Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth

“I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them. Or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess (and thus which possesses them).”
― Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History