“You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”
―
Omar El Akkad,
American War
“It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester-perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence-a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“This country has a long history of defining its generations by the conflicts that should have killed them.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“Sarat smiled at the thought. "You couldn't just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?""Come now," said Yousef. "Everyone fights an American war.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“The west you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairytale, a fantasy you sell yourself because the alternative is to admit that you are the least important character in your own story. You invent an entire world because your conscience demands it, you invent good people and bad people and you draw a neat line between them because your simplistic morality demands it. But the two kinds of people in this world are not good and bad, they are engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be the engines and you will always, always be fuel.” ― Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise
“And what she understood - what none of the ones who came to touch Simon's forehead understood - was that the misery of war represented the world's only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same - and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she'd learned, was simple: If it had been you, you'd have done no different.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“It is said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past - the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“Sarat thought about how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that even broken history is history. The stars, cast wrong, must remain that way. It would be more wrong to change them.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“Katrina hated to see the widows in black. They struck her as relics of their own making, frozen in permanent deference to reckless or foolish or simply unfortunate men who were nonetheless dead and sealed away in the earth forever. Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflecting on others the very same carnage once inflicted on them. It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds. Some of the women she met never used their own names again - she knew them only as Widow This or Widow That - but she'd never met a Widower Anything.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it'll never be like that again, and they'll never be young again, no matter what they do.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“You know what this country is?” she said. “This country is a man trying to describe a burning building without using the word fire.-Omar El Akkad in "Riverbed” ― Victor LaValle, A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers
“What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“Every man you ever meet in nothing but the product of what was withheld from him, what he feels owed.” ― Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise
“I’m sorry, Sarat.” “Why’d you do it?” she asked me. “I just wanted to know.” “Don’t ever apologize for that,” she said. “That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester-perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence-a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“This country has a long history of defining its generations by the conflicts that should have killed them.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“Sarat smiled at the thought. "You couldn't just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?""Come now," said Yousef. "Everyone fights an American war.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“The west you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairytale, a fantasy you sell yourself because the alternative is to admit that you are the least important character in your own story. You invent an entire world because your conscience demands it, you invent good people and bad people and you draw a neat line between them because your simplistic morality demands it. But the two kinds of people in this world are not good and bad, they are engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be the engines and you will always, always be fuel.” ― Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise
“And what she understood - what none of the ones who came to touch Simon's forehead understood - was that the misery of war represented the world's only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same - and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she'd learned, was simple: If it had been you, you'd have done no different.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“It is said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past - the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“Sarat thought about how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that even broken history is history. The stars, cast wrong, must remain that way. It would be more wrong to change them.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“Katrina hated to see the widows in black. They struck her as relics of their own making, frozen in permanent deference to reckless or foolish or simply unfortunate men who were nonetheless dead and sealed away in the earth forever. Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflecting on others the very same carnage once inflicted on them. It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds. Some of the women she met never used their own names again - she knew them only as Widow This or Widow That - but she'd never met a Widower Anything.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it'll never be like that again, and they'll never be young again, no matter what they do.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“You know what this country is?” she said. “This country is a man trying to describe a burning building without using the word fire.-Omar El Akkad in "Riverbed” ― Victor LaValle, A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers
“What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“Every man you ever meet in nothing but the product of what was withheld from him, what he feels owed.” ― Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise
“I’m sorry, Sarat.” “Why’d you do it?” she asked me. “I just wanted to know.” “Don’t ever apologize for that,” she said. “That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
“It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds.” ― Omar El Akkad, American War
