American War Quotes

“You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester-perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence-a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“This country has a long history of defining its generations by the conflicts that should have killed them.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Sarat smiled at the thought. "You couldn't just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?"

"Come now," said Yousef. "Everyone fights an American war.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“And what she understood - what none of the ones who came to touch Simon's forehead understood - was that the misery of war represented the world's only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same - and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she'd learned, was simple: If it had been you, you'd have done no different.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“It is said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past - the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Sarat thought about how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that even broken history is history. The stars, cast wrong, must remain that way. It would be more wrong to change them.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Katrina hated to see the widows in black. They struck her as relics of their own making, frozen in permanent deference to reckless or foolish or simply unfortunate men who were nonetheless dead and sealed away in the earth forever.

Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflecting on others the very same carnage once inflicted on them. It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds. Some of the women she met never used their own names again - she knew them only as Widow This or Widow That - but she'd never met a Widower Anything.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it'll never be like that again, and they'll never be young again, no matter what they do.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Everyone fights an American war.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its”
― 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

“It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“You got the sense from being around them that no war in the history of South Carolina had ever ended, that they were still fighting all of them at once.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“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

“I’m sorry, Sarat.” “Why’d you do it?” she asked me. “I just wanted to know.” “Don’t ever apologize for that,” she said. “That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Her anger at the young woman's stubbornness quickly prompted recollections of all the times she'd found herself on one side or another of these meaningless, bigoted demarcations; all the times she'd been made to feel alien to some stranger's expectation of what constituted the right and normal world---the color of her skin, the ethnicity of the man she'd chosen to marry, even her tomboy daughter.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence—a violence of cowardice, silence, submission.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester—perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence—a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Nativism being a pyramid scheme, I found myself contemptuous of the refugees’ presence in a city already overburdened. At the foot of the docks, we yelled at them to go home, even though we knew home to be a pestilence field. We carried signs calling them terrorists and criminals and we vandalized the homes that would take them in. It made me feel good to do it, it made me feel rooted; their unbelonging was proof of my belonging.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“All her life she'd had little interest in the workings of boys' minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“This country has a long history of defining its generations by the conflicts that should have killed them, and”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“...she was overcome by anger and a rabid desire to ruin those who’d ruined her.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness.What she and others like her were allowed was a kind of passive bereavement, the right to pose for newspaper photographs holding framed pictures of their dead relations in their hands, the right to march in boisterous but toothless parades, the right to call for an end to bloodshed as though bloodshed were some pest or vagrant who could be evicted or run out of town. As long as she adhered to those rules, moved within those margins, she remained worthy of grand, public sympathy.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“In the course of her letter writing, she’d learned a few things about the subtle peculiarities of the South’s power brokers. The Mississippi Sovereigns, like most other rebel groups, preferred to be addressed as Brothers; letters to Mr. Sharif, the director of Camp Patience, were exclusively read and acted upon by his secretary, but could never be addressed to his secretary; the Free Southern State government in Atlanta had a perfect record of responding to every letter, but no sooner than two years after the fact. She learned which methods of attack worked and which didn’t. Any familial relation between appellant and recipient, no matter how tenuous, was to be ruthlessly exploited; pictures of dead relatives or horrific war wounds never did any good, although the refugees in possession of such images invariably demanded they be sent anyway; a direct offer of bribery was more likely than not to elicit an insulted response, but an offer to make a donation to a cause of the recipient’s choosing got the same message across more tactfully. It was, in the end, hopeless work, the letters almost always doomed to fail. But for the refugees who paid or begged Martina to write these pleadings on their behalf, hopelessness was no impediment to hope.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War