Omar El Akkad

“She wanted her to feel love the way a bone feels a break, to make her scream in a language she never…

— Omar El Akkad

“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they…

— Omar El Akkad

“This country has a long history of defining its generations by the conflicts that should have killed them.”

— Omar El Akkad

“She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken…

— Omar El Akkad

“I know how much you have fought and how much you have suffered. You want something the size of your vengeance, Sarat?…

— Omar El Akkad

“Everyone fights an American war.”

— Omar El Akkad

“What is the first anesthetic? Wealth. And if I take your wealth? Necessities. And if I demolish your home, burn your fields?…

— Omar El Akkad

“I wanted for that other place. I wanted for the part of the world where I believed there existed a fundamental kind…

— Omar El Akkad

“Katrina hated to see the widows in black. They struck her as relics of their own making, frozen in permanent deference to…

— Omar El Akkad

“It's a strange thing to be dying. For so long I thought the end of my life would come suddenly, when the…

— Omar El Akkad

“On Sarat’s side of the tent there were no posters and few possessions. In a large plastic bowl she kept a potpourri…

— Omar El Akkad

“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like…

— Omar El Akkad

“...she was overcome by anger and a rabid desire to ruin those who’d ruined her.”

— Omar El Akkad

“They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”

— Omar El Akkad

“There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a…

— Omar El Akkad

“they rounded us all up for interrogation. They wanted names and crimes and we gave them both in droves. One guy I…

— Omar El Akkad

“All her life she'd had little interest in the workings of boys' minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy…

— Omar El Akkad

“Sarat thought about how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that…

— Omar El Akkad

“That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.”

— Omar El Akkad

“Unlike the river and the bush and the beasts and birds of the natural world, the lipstick did not interest her; it…

— Omar El Akkad