Evan

“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

“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

“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

“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