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21 " Just because you’re fighting evil doesn’t mean you’re good. And just because you’re doing evil doesn’t mean you’re bad. You end up with the conclusion that there is no ultimate right or wrong. It’s all shades of gray. "
― Wendy Pearlman , We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria
22 " What’s crucial in this whole process is that you don’t matter. You as an individual—your aspirations, your ideas about what is right—mean absolutely nothing. And that’s when you understand why people get radicalized. I completely understand why somebody would join ISIS or al-Qaeda or the Assad regime or the Kurdish groups. You are in dire need for a narrative that can justify this futility. There has to be a point. So you become radical. This suffering has to be for a reason. Otherwise it’s too painful. "
23 " But I think I’m too old to dream now. In a month and a half, I’ll be twenty-nine. "
24 " Today, the word “refugee” is used in a horrible way. It’s something either to be pitied or blamed for everything. Overpopulation? It’s the refugees. Rents going up? It’s the refugees. Crime? It’s the refugees. If you label people refugees, they remain refugees for the rest of their lives. "
25 " Many people aren’t happy with the refugees coming to their country. Maybe we came illegally, but every other door was shut in our faces. What do they expect us to do? Isn’t it enough our government destroyed us and we lost everything? We would prefer to stay in our country. If you don’t want refugees, help us make peace in Syria. "
26 " You can’t imagine how he died. His toenails were ripped out. His bones had been pierced with a drill. There were marks from being beaten and burned. His nose was beaten so severely that it was flat. "
27 " I can’t sleep without the sounds of bombs or bullets. It’s like something’s missing. "
28 " There was one child from the camp with polio. He used to come and say to me, “When I was a little kid . . .” And he was only ten years old. "
29 " This is when we lost our humanity. I’d open my phone and look at my contacts and only one or two were still alive. "
30 " That next day, the regime launched chemical weapons. They hit very close to our house. My uncle and cousin were killed. It was like poison that burned their bodies from the inside. "
31 " Hopelessness is seeing someone else who has been there for eight months and hasn’t been asked a single question and is just begging to be convicted and executed already. "
32 " I lived through rockets that would explode children into a million pieces. Sometimes we’d clean up body parts with our own hands. There wouldn’t be a whole body to pick up. Just a hand or a leg or a head. "
33 " The second patient had been shot in the frontal lobe. He was there with his son, who was maybe eleven years old. The boy would leave at night, knock on doors asking for help, and then go back to his dad. On the third day, the army entered the hospital and killed them both. We saw them take the corpses away. "
34 " That August was the chemical weapons attack. "
35 " In the streets you saw people frozen in their cars, suffocated to death. "
36 " Imagine that you find your own neighborhood looking like Hiroshima. Destruction. Buildings knocked to the ground. A strange calm . . . as if you’re in a theater. Silence. Only the tweet of sparrows. "
37 " Sometimes I joke to Munir that someone should gather all of us Syrians in one place and kill us so we can be done with this whole thing already. Then we’ll all go to heaven and leave Bashar al-Assad to rule over an empty country. "
38 " At the interrogation center, they made us take off all our clothes. They mocked us and spat on us, but it was actually more dignifying than humiliating. You didn’t do anything but say, “Freedom,” and that was enough to rattle the entire regime and make them panic. For me, that was victory. "
39 " If someone wants citizenship quickly, he goes to Sweden. For young people who like to have fun, the Netherlands is the choice. Germany is for people who want to study and work. "
40 " ...no country in the world is paying attention to me. Not a single one is doing anything to protect any fraction of the rights that I should have as a human being living on earth. I'm not saying that the conscience of the international community is asleep. I'm saying that conscience doesn't exist at all. "