Abby > Abby's Quotes

“Dictatorship, in its own twisted way, was understandable; repression was universal. War is so random, so arbitrary.”
― Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War

“History is written by the victors, they say, but it seems to me that history is written above all by those who weren't there, which may be the same thing.”
― Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

“The American dream was to create our own destiny, but it's perhaps an ethical duty, as a human being, and as an American, to consider that our American dreams may have come at the expense of a million other destinies.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“Survival, though, means more than going on. It means understanding the past and finding a way to subdue it, to reconcile it, to overcome it.”
― Edward Gargan, The River's Tale: A Year on the Mekong

“Apart from trade, the main form of interaction between nations is war.”
― Christopher Kremmer, The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten-Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes

“Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church - read on - and give his life for her (Eph. V, 25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is - in her own mere nature - least lovable. For the Church has not beauty but what the Bride-groom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man's marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Reunion has taught me that there is no way to remake your history or your family in the image you want. But there can be more, if you are willing to look for those stories that were lost - you might just find someone new to forgive, to love, to grow with. Someone to take your hand and search *with* you.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“But then you can't hope for much justice in the subcontinent, where fulfillment comes to very few among the needy and restless millions, and where aspiration itself can feel like a luxury. In Kashmir, isolated and oppressed and then dragged into the larger world of competing men and nations and murderous ideologies, more people have been confronted with this awareness in the last ten years than in all of its tormented modern history.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

“The Right has thus ceded the moral response entirely to the Left, while the Left has ceded the patriotic response entirely to the Right. France has suffered from both reactions. The country needed moralists less joyfully resigned to their country's misfortune and patriots less willing to allow torturers to act in France's name...
Which makes for two different policies but one single surrender, because the real question is not how to die separately but how to live together.”
― Albert Camus

“One must fight for one's truth while making sure not to kill that truth with the very arms employed to defend it: only if both criteria are satisfied can words recover their meaning. With this in mind, the role of the intellectual is to seek by his own lights to make out the respective limits of force and justice in each camp. It is to explain the meaning of words in such a way as to sober minds and calm fanaticism, even if this means working against the grain.”
― Albert Camus, Algerian Chronicles

“Throughout those years of war, as I frantically scoured the hinterland for the old manuscripts that the heads of monasteries had secreted in lacquered chests, I witnessed the Americans' imperviousness to the realities of Cambodia. Yet today I do not know what I reproach them for more, their intervention or their withdrawal.”
― François Bizot, The Gate