Mar’s Reviews > Babel > Status Update

“That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”

“Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world.”

“We have to d*e to get their pity. We have to d*e for them to find us noble. Our d*aths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our d*aths become their battle cry.”

My poor sweet angel Victoire 🥺

“Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the convenience of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured.”

“Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited.”

The problem is that we’re always living like we’ve lost… we see their guns, their silver-work, and their shops, and we think it’s already over for us. We don’t stop to consider what things would look like if we took the gun.”

“…who professed always to love her, to absolutely adore her, but who failed to hear anything she was saying if it didn’t comport with how she already saw the world.”

Stressed is an understatement

“He was fine w resistance as long as it didn’t hurt him. And the contradiction was fine, as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, or look too closely. But spelled out like this, in such bleak terms, it seemed unarguable that far from being a revolutionary, Robin, in fact, had no convictions whatsoever.”