Home > Author > Omar El Akkad
61 " You’re clean because of what was done to you at Patience. All the politicians and the rebels and even the preachers, they might say the right things, but they haven’t been made clean like you. That’s why they send you money, that’s why they write you those letters saying you’re in their prayers. Because you’re clean. "
― Omar El Akkad , American War
62 " Vanna could not help but think of ancestry as a king of shackle one could never fully unclasp, an umbilical cord that, not matter how deeply cut, could never be severed. "
― Omar El Akkad , What Strange Paradise
63 " The refugees peer from their small, tattered tents to watch because this is what they have become: watchers, honed by captivity into seasoned observers of incremental change. "
64 " In their silent reticence was evident the reality that somewhere along the journey they'd passed the point where human goodness gave way to the calculus of survival. "
65 " I told the President’s people if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, and not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over. But in the end, Columbus went along with it. And even today, all these years later, we live with the consequences. They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories. "
66 " high on the easy camaraderie of the freshly drunk. "
67 " On Sarat’s side of the tent there were no posters and few possessions. In a large plastic bowl she kept a potpourri of war seeds—bullet casings and wild-toothed slivers of shrapnel. They were given to her as presents by the sullen grunts charged with scouring the Northern boundary of the camp for land mines. She liked watching the soldiers work, their frames hunchbacked, their ancient metal detectors helplessly beeping. "
68 " أثناء الحرب تقاتل بالبنادق، لكنّك أثناء السّلام تقاتل بالحكايات. "
69 " لسنا وطنيين من الجنوب ولا من أي مكان آخر، بل نُحاول الخروج مِن هُنا. سنُسافر إلى الشمال. لسنا وطنيين ولن يكون بيننا شهداء "
70 " Farther out, the water sheds its sandy complexion and turns a turquoise of such clarity that the tourists’ sailboats seem to float atop their own shadows. "
71 " And what do you think the prerequisite for kindness is? Have you ever tried to be kind to someone better off than you? "
72 " She knew from experience that there existed no soldier as efficient, as coldly unburdened by fear, as a child broken early. "
73 " This isn't a story about war. It's about ruin. "
74 " I am back home by a riverbank and I am happy and I still lover her. My secret is that I still love her. This isn't a story about war. It's about ruin. "
75 " That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know. "
76 " 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. "
77 " 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. "
78 " Karina 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. "
79 " She couldn't understand why her sister derived no fascination from exploring the tiny living worlds all around them- worlds whose myriad secrets lay ripe for the taking: the flying balls of blood trapped in the bowl; the eyes of the pine floorboards laced with honey; worms picked by her father's hand and impaled on hooks to teach the children a ritual from the days when the river still carried fish. Dana found such things tedious or repulsive, but to Sarat they were the veins and arteries through which life's magic flowed. "
80 " Some of the women she met never used their own names again—she knew them only as the Widow This or the Widow That—but she’d never met a Widower Anything. "