Only Cry For The Living Quotes

“Safety, for now, feels something of an illusion. The black flags of ISIS still wave in the shadows.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“I spent a restless night on a cot surrounded by dozens of strange men inside the headquarters of the Mosul Civil Defense Unit. In the minutes between dark and daylight, we boarded trucks to make the drive to Tel Afar. The unit had received information that two mass graves containing at least twenty bodies were submerged beneath slabs of concrete and decomposing in the sewage system of the former ISIS bulwark — a sickening reminder of the lasting devastation caused by the group’s three-year occupation of northern Iraq”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“The ordinary — the ones that raised their babies in times of steep uncertainty — were of great intrigue to me. Life for this young family had indeed been hard, but it seemed not to occur to Noor that it could have been any different or easier.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“The broken bones might heal and the open wounds might close, but victims of such merciless torture would never again have a safe place in the world to call home. Their flesh would be the prison walls against which their mind would thrash, but they would be unable to run.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“It was the place that the helpless visited day in and day out, tearing their hair out and pacing the garden outside as they waited for news about their missing loved ones with the kind of agony that made me think they would shatter into tears at the slightest touch. The worst news was no news because the anguish would endure. But despite the desperation that clung to the walls, the building was a place of profound survival.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“It seemed to me that they wanted freedom, but they were also scared of freedom. If they had freedom, that meant others had freedom too — freedom to drive on any road and pass any checkpoint. Those others belonged to the unknown, and could strike them again.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“It was the streaks of pink and yellow flushing the early morning skies that could only exist in the Middle East. The region produced the most extraordinary sunrises and sunsets I had ever seen — a beautiful, deceptive umbrella hiding the bloodshed below.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“From the glistening eyes of a child that once held hope, foreign faces, aid workers, and people dressed in suits had come to symbolize a sequence of disappointments. Abdullah was tired of talking about what he needed most; it had become a fruitless exercise. He and many others had come to believe that the other camps in the area were getting all the money. They felt as though they were the only ones who had been left out and made to suffer.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“Once-barren patches of empty dust across Iraq had been dramatically transformed by countless numbers of sprawling, fast-filling tent camps. Sometimes, those patches of earth contained so many tents that they stretched out into the groove of the horizon beyond what the naked eye could see, and it was impossible to fathom just how many lives had been upended in a single plot.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“A row of young boys sat along an old metal pipe, excitedly singing Arabic songs. The girls whizzed each other around in wheelbarrows and played with their dolls on patches of earth that had hardened from mud to crusty dirt. “It is still like a playpen to them, like a big party,” one frail father said absently, as if he was staring right through me. “Soon they will know.” Crevices of stress had been delicately carved into his tanned face. His party was one of torment as he paced in circles, as if slowly going mad. I did not know what had happened to him and his family, but it did not feel right to ask.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“Father Daniel moved toward the sunlight sinking in the west. “Through all their sadness and depression, they wanted revenge,” he continued. “I knew I needed to build a unique environment for them.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“While they may never be the ones to read this book, it is these ordinary people for whom this book is written — by capturing anecdotes of their lives and nuggets of their history, I had figured they would never disappear into the void that is the collateral damage of war. Somehow, they would stay alive forever. They would know that their presence, their stories, and their contribution to the world truly mattered.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“People floated through the tiny waiting room looking for news of their loved ones, their eyes haunting and desperate. One aging man, dressed in his most elegant suit, pulled out his phone and started showing me photographs of smiling children. All eight of them had been missing since the morning ISIS marauded through their village two summers ago. The goats on his farm had mostly died, he said. Maybe of heartache. Maybe of dehydration. Another, younger man in farmer’s trousers stared out into the sunshine, nervously yanking at strands of hair until small chunks fell upon his plaid suit coat as he slowly went mad with infirmity.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“What is war? Most of it is time spent waiting, woven with bursts of intensity. Time seemed to slow and every second labored by, lacquered with anxiousness as the soldiers stood in a formation, surrounding one building that had been spared the chaos.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living

“When they referred to their soldiers killed on the battlefield, they sometimes said that they were martyred, and sometimes said they were murdered. I wondered how differently Americans would see wars if the press and the people spoke of our troops in the firing line as having died in a homicide rather than killed in action. The rain fell harder, and bullets flew wildly into the growing darkness that hid the dead ISIS bodies nearby. Hungry, untamed dogs had gouged into the skeletons almost immediately. Some had been dead for days. Some had names and others had been left nameless. Some, maculated by the creatures howling at the moon, had no faces.”
― Hollie S. McKay, Only Cry For The Living