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"Why is it that when they hide their faces, men become monsters instead of angels?"

"But I still connect with women. I find companionship with them, closeness that cannot be denied, because the world will always do its damnedest to see me as one of them. As long as we are seen the same, we will experience the same."

"/The only thing that will ever matter is how others see you./ I want to take myself apart into something else, and if I cannot do that, I want to destroy every part of it that could ever be used against me."

"We have also learned a respect for power that goes beyond mere obedience. We obey our institutions without any commands being given; we believe that we are behaving naturally. It seems natural to submit to power. We are even prepared to believe that people who are powerful are also right, because they could not otherwise have become powerful."

"Small children are eager to be helpful, but because their help is often something of a hindrance, adults deliberately train them not to help. Helping is thought of as getting in the way. It is unreasonable to train someone not to do something, and later to complain because they don't do it."

"'Se on ensimmäinen asia, joka huomataan', hän sanoo pettyneesti. 'Erilaisuus. Ihan kuin se olisi rikos.'"

//

"'It's the first thing that is observed,' she says, disappointed. 'Difference. As if it was a crime.'"

"Jos kuolema olisi tunne, se olisi tätä: näkymättömyyttä, elämistä huonosti istuvissa vaatteissa, jalka kiristävässä kengässä."

//

"If death were to be a feeling, it would be this: invisibility, living in clothes that don't fit right, a foot in a shoe that strains."

"Joskus leikki alkaa niin, että puen ylleni sukupuolettoman asun, kuin hahmottoman viitan, ja lähden ulos, ja sitten ihmiset alkavat olettaa, heitä häiritsee ettei heillä ole asiasta selvyyttä, julkisissa kulkuneuvoissa, ravintoloissa, kahviloissa, kuin puutikku kynnen alla he kysyvät joko toisiltaan tai minulta suoraan: Oletko mies vai nainen?"

"We don't like children to watch the horrors on the news because, we say, it affects them too strongly. We feel we can take it, but what this actually means is that we are able to ignore it. ... When we say that we don't want children to have to face such prospects we are actually protecting ourselves from the perfectly rational distress and fear that younger people have not yet learned to suppress."

"Obedience is a concept invented by those in authority to make it easier to achieve their own ends, to relieve them of the tasks of persuasion and justification."

not going to add quotes because the content is very heavy but the past 4 pages floored me. i am speechless and cannot move on that was so intense.

"Elämästä on tullut julmaa, ja ihmiset ovat tottuneet siihen, kuolleen ihmisen ruumis ei ole enää kuolleen ihmisen ruumis vaan kuolleen ihmisen ruumiin kuva."
//
"Life has become cruel and people are used to it, the corpse of a dead person is no longer a corpse but a picture of a corpse."

"We train ourselves to withstand emotion. Part of growing up is learning not to cry over fairy-tales, but in learning not to care too much about the fate of characters in fiction we diminish its power to move us. What is worse is that we also learn a certain indifference to the sufferings of real people."

"Vihalle voi antaa periksi; siitä voi päästä yli tai sille voi antaa elämänsä, mutta inho toimii toisella tavalla. Se kaivautuu kynsien alle eikä lähde, vaikka purisi sormensa irti."
//
"One can succumb to hate; one can get over it or give one's life to it, but disgust works in a different way. It burrows under fingernails and doesn't leave, not even if one were to bite the fingers off."

"At what point does childhood sadness become adult sadness anyway?"

"'You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That's pretty much the same thing, no?A writer just takes longer to hit the water."

real

"Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation."

"'You think there's some nobility in being above anger?'"

"'--I passed over that moment, the moment I could've died but didn't, and I didn't even know it. I didn't even know it happened. And everything since has been bonus, you know?'"

"'The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,' said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they'd wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt."

"Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good."

"But when I am away from Reuben, living out there in the world as only myself, being 'free', I do not find anywhere near the depth of love and warmth that I have when I am with him."

"I remember being told (or did I overhear it?) that he would probably never be able to do a whole host of things. From day one, those comments instilled in our family a determination that we'd do everything we could to prove them all wrong."

"I will have to be much more than his brother. I will have to be his carer, his parent, his friend, his interpreter in a world that doesn't want to understand him."

"Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered - is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?"

"I found out later that the army had been provided with eight hundred thousand rounds that day. This was at a time when the population of the city stood at four hundred thousand. In other words, they had been given the means to drive a bullet into the body of every person in the city twice over."

"'I couldn't communicate with anyone in my family. So I often imagined I was adopted. For some reason some distant relatives gave me up to my family. Or maybe they got me from an orphanage. Now I realize how silly that idea was. My parents aren't the type to adopt a helpless orphan. Anyway, I couldn't accept the fact that I was related by blood to these people. It was easier to think they were complete strangers."

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the Earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"

"'You've always written because you wanted to. If you don't want to any more, why should you? Do you think your not writing is going to cause a village to burn to the ground? A ship to sink? The tides to get messed up? Or set the revolution back five years? Hardly.'"

"'Why did you love him when you could've loved me?' she said. 'What does he have that I don't, other than he's a boy and I'm a girl?'
But I had loved her all my life. I had loved her before we knew what the world was, what love was, and who we ourselves were. But all these things I could not say."