Vikram

“Shrink the humanity of your enemy, and the fighting must seem easier, more just, less complicated. Warfare consists of several psychological tricks, not least the ones you play upon yourself.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.”
― Jean Genet

“how to live away from places and people I love. Joseph Brodsky was right. So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured. But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right: never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow. What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?”
― Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

“And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”
― Hisham Matar, The Return