Quotessence
Home / Authors / Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllWarPalestineGazaGaza WarPoliticsGenocideLovePowerRepublicansActivismAmericaDeathHatePalestiniansAngerEvilFearInjusticePrivilegeSuffering

Famous Omar El Akkad Quotes

“I think of a line that has always stayed with me, from Marwa Helal's "poem for brad who wants me to write about the pyramids." "This is where the poets will interject. They will say show- dont tell. But that assumes most people can see." It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit- exclaim, even- that no description of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it. At the very least, one should not be able to have it both ways. One should not, with a modicum of self-respect, quote Morrison and Baldwin at every turn, but then, faced with the sort of injustice with which so much of their work contends, suddenly retreat into descriptions of whatever it is the finches are doing. What is this work we do? What are we good for? The literary critic Northup Frye once said, "all art is metaphor. And the metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity. Our derangement. The plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul. One's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot, in any rational way, be understood. Only felt. Only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque- what we do to one another so grotesque- that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.”

ArtSufferingLossGriefGenocide
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Create image

“In time, there will be nothing particularly controversial about using these words to describe the things they were created to describe. (The very history of the word “genocide,” meant as a mechanic of forewarning rather than some after-the-fact resolution, is littered with instances of the world’s most powerful governments going to whatever lengths they can to avoid its usage, because usage is attached to obligation. It was never intended to be enough to simply call something genocide: one is required to act.) Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.”

WarLanguageWordsGenocidePalestineGazaPalestiniansGaza War
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Create image

“Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but in the places where the bombs are built and launched it will have no bearing on mortgages, bills, employment... Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that's what those people do, they die... For millions of Westerners this will always prove true. But for millions more it will not.”

WarPoliticsGenocidePalestine
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Create image

“It's not surprising, I don't think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active work in opposing genocide are Jews. Here is love born of pain, if the past century's most horrific crime, love of one's own spread outward into love of another. Whatever the empire is, it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres neither to the empire’s own central principle of self-interest nor to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one’s own, that love for one’s people may never become love for another.”

LovePainActivismOppositionProtestGenocideBrotherhoodSolidarityJews
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Create image

“Look up photographs of what we now consider this country's -- any country's -- most morally diseased moments. [...] Ignore, for a moment, the people engaged most directly in the violence. Look instead at the faces of those who watch from the sidelines. Often, what you'll find is not an expression of proud support or the shock and horror all these people will claim to have felt much later, after the verdict is in. Rather, you'll see a childish little smirk. It's the smirk of someone who has come to realize the ugliness of the enterprise they have passively aligned with but cannot muster the courage to abandon now.”

SocietyProtestGenocideApathyPalestine
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Create image