MC > MC's Quotes

“Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?”
― Peter Shaffer, Amadeus

“It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“In the end, your belly was your emperor.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“People are awful. Drink some beer.” Haruki”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Patriotism is just an idea, so is capitalism or communism. But ideas can make men forget their own interests. And the guys in charge will exploit men who believe in ideas too much.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Light is only possible through dialogue between cultures, not through rejection of one or the other.”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

“But American history is not meant to be pretty. It is plain. It is simple. It is strong and truthful. Full of blood.”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

“It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open one's mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate. Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor's house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor's leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn't only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
― bell hooks

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption in hindsight of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. While the terrible thing is happening, while the land is still being stolen, and the natives still being killed, any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight. I tell stories for a living and there’s a thick thread of narrative by well-meaning white Westerners that exalts the native populations in so many parts of the world for standing up to the occupiers. Makes of their narrative a neat, reflexive arc in which it was always understood by the colonized and, this part implied, the descendants of the colonizer, that what happened was wrong.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“And it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Anything to avoid contending with the possibility that all this killing wasn’t the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“But the word “radicalize” feels wrong, seems to imply an element of extremism, as though rage at this kind of blatant hypocrisy is the abnormal thing, when what is plainly abnormal is to accept it.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“What is the first anesthetic?
Wealth.
And if I take your wealth?
Necessities.
And if I demolish your home, burn your fields?
Acknowledgement.
And if I make it taboo to sympathize with your plight?
Family.
And if I kill your family?
God.
And God...
...Hasn't said a word in two thousand years. (136)”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?”
― Omar El Akkad, American War