Evan > Evan's Quotes

“To get a sense of the scale of Earth history, imagine walking back in time, a hundred years per step—every pace equal to more than three human generations. A mile takes you 175,000 years into the past. The twenty miles of Chesapeake cliffs, a hard day’s walk to be sure, correspond to more than 3 million years. But to make even a small dent in Earth history, you would have to keep walking at that rate for many weeks. Twenty days of effort at twenty miles a day and a hundred years per step would take you back 70 million years, to just before the mass death of the dinosaurs. Five months of twenty-mile walks would correspond to more than 530 million years, the time of the Cambrian “explosion”—the near-simultaneous emergence of myriad hard-shelled animals. But at a hundred years per footstep, you’d have to walk for almost three years to reach the dawn of life, and almost four years to arrive at Earth’s beginnings.”
― Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

“she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.”
― Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“In the Middle East I’d seen North Americans and Europeans arrive and immediately cocoon themselves into gated compounds and gated friendships. So normalized was this walling off that a Westerner could spend decades in a place like Qatar and only briefly contend with the inconvenience of their host nation’s ways of living. (It would come as a genuine surprise to me, years later, when I came to the West and found that this precise thing was a routine accusation lobbed at people from my part of the world. We simply did not do enough to learn the language, the culture. We stubbornly refused to assimilate.)”
― 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

“The idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking away toward--never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it's not cynicism, it's not doing nothing--it's a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The truth and reconciliation committees are coming. The land acknowledgements are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This