Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim Quotes

“When I was in my twenties I heard a musician speak about his pacifism. He said that often when he says he’s a pacifist, the reply is: Come on, if someone beat up your mother you’d want to kick their ass. And his reply to this was: Yes, if someone beat up my mother, of course I’d want to kick their ass. Because sometimes violence is necessary, especially in self-defence. (And a revolutionary struggle is also a kind of self-defence.) But the point he wants to make is that, even though it is sometimes necessary, that doesn’t make it right, doesn’t make it good. Violence is sometimes necessary but it is never good. A bomb doesn’t know good from bad, it falls and explodes and kills. And every time it does, someone profits. Someone makes money.”
― Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

“We are all protagonists in our own lives, but the systems we live under don’t care. A bomb doesn’t ask who is good or bad—it only profits those in power. Capitalism, patriarchy, racism—they don’t die easily. But awareness is the first step. Becoming anti-sexist, anti-racist, and fighting back is how we refuse to let them win.”
― Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

“And once again it makes me realize how never in my life as a writer have I genuinely tried to get anything “right,” if getting it right means an accurate portrayal of reality, or even if it means providing access to something we might call truth or wisdom. In fact, it now seems to me, I have attempted to do almost the opposite, a search for how to “get it wrong” as evocatively as possible. Or to fully engage in the struggle between getting it right and getting it wrong. Of course, I’m always considering ethics, so I would never want to be ethically wrong, or to harm anyone with my words, but nonetheless there is the desire to be artistically off-kilter in ways that create the possibility of seeing things anew. To fully admit that I don’t know. But now I’m not so sure. Rethinking all such assumptions might be one of the many ways I find myself trying to change.”
― Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

“Something we talked about many times is that if art or literature only shows that the world is awful, perhaps it is only adding to the awfulness rather than combatting it.”
― Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

“And I saw, time and time again, that the reality that everyone dies was always, also, a question of how we should live. That to come fully to terms with our own impermanence was the only way one could begin to live for a cause larger than oneself. (In preparing to write this afterword I was often forced to reflect on how literature also has to do with the anxiety that one will die. To leave something behind and therefore disappear a little bit less completely.) I came to believe this might be one of the reasons our species wastes unprecedented amounts of time killing each other: we don’t want to fully come to terms with the fact that we die so we try to hide from it—to gain the upper hand, so to speak—by taking the lives of others. If we are the bringer of death, how can we only be its victim?”
― Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim