Omar El Akkad, American War
8 quotes
"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)"
"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."
"Everyone fights an 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."
"Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy."
"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."
"She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self defense."
"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."