Sunil Yapa Quotes

Doing something, he had discovered, anything, however small, that contributed to your meaningfulness of self and surroundings—well, that was the trick. That was the trick to not feel like shit.

There where they learned that courage is not the ability to face your fear, heroically, once, but is the strength to do it day after day. Night after night. Faith without end. Love without border.

Well the days of community policing were over. The world was a bottleful of sparkling darkness and cops the ones charged with keeping the cork in while the rich shook and shook.

Because how deep the darkness of the heart which longs for control.

What we require of others so that we may live our lives of easy convenience. Dad, there are people who work all day every day for thirty years assembling the three wires that make a microwave timer beep. What are we supposed to think of this? How do they survive it? Why do we ask them to?

Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.

The ultimate social law, the law of respect. In some ways, a large offense done with respect was more easily overlooked than a small offense done with disrespect.

Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privelege, wasn't it? To think blindness a preferable condition.

What is the function of the heart, if not to convince the blood to stay moving with the limits where it belongs, to stay at home. Stay at home, stay at home, stay at home. But restless thing that it is, your blood, it leaps into the world.

But that was the thing with anger. That was the tricky thing about pain. Sometimes it was hiding around a corner just waiting to slice you from stomach to throat.

WE SEEK A WORLD IN WHICH THERE IS ROOM FOR MANY WORLDS

Yes, violence was a genie in a bottle, even state-sanctioned, legal violence, because she knew the primal law, the lead-lined equation which was the foundation of all that happened on the street: if you want to carry a gun, you better be prepared to pull a gun; and if you pull a gun, you had better be prepared in heart, body, soul, and mind to fire a gun. To kill.

Victor wanted to have the strength to watch, to witness the brutality and be strong enough to tell the world about it. He wanted to witness it and by witnessing make it real, unable to be forgotten; he wanted this horror seared into every pale pink fiber of his skull.

What is the function of the heart, if not to convince the blood to stay moving with the limits where it belongs, to stay at home.

The year she died Victor did serious time among the books. He schooled himself from the boxes. He liked to read. He liked crashing down there in the basement with the smell of concrete and earth, liked reading his mother's old books, liked the idea that he had inherited more than his dark skin and dark hair from the woman who disappeared.

Did they not find a connection between their obscene wealth and the obscene poverty all around them? Perhaps it was too much to suggest the fault was theirs alone. The upper class was too goddamn stupid to be blamed, frankly. But how could they do nothing? How could they look upon their fellow creatures suffering and do absolutely nothing?

What about an unarmed nineteen-year-old scares an unarmed police officer?

Compassion for every living blade of grass, and yet walls thirty feet high, six feet thick from within which you meditate on the unity and beauty of all things. Son, does this make my point?

Gandhi was the man that freed a nation, but it was Nehru -- a man of compromise -- that built it. It was Gandhi who freed a people; but it was Nehru -- a politician -- who gave them jobs. Which one should he choose? His doubts weighed against his duty. You cannot have prosperity without a nation of your own. And yet, what good is freedom if you are shackled to your hunger by chains as thick as any ever worn by slaves?

Victor of course never failed to fire a monster joint on these underground missions. And there he would sit reading. He liked how those books made him feel, the books and the weed, his brain humming with knowledge, an odd and lovely sort of expansion feeling these threads of words that stretched across continents and decades, a sort of feeling that he, too, was stretched and flattened, his brain spread like a map across the world.

Together they made love among the mimeographed pages of their zine and the ink stained their bodies with letters and strange hieroglyph tattoos which they examined together in the moonlight drifting through the window, laughing.

And yet there he was, his son, looking and smiling through his half-opened eyes, not a look of concern, but as if he understood in some way, the sometime knowledge of what this is, the knowledge of the whole ugly beautiful thing, the knowledge of the courage it takes to move into fear and to fuck up and to go on living, knowing that sometimes it is two people alone and some small kindness between them that is not even called family, or forgiveness, but might be what some, on the good days, call love.

But this time, no. She would not let her rage overcome her. Neither her despair. She would not meet violence with violence. She believed in the transcendent power of love, the overwhelming force of nonviolence, and it was love that had saved her long ago when the anger had burned her to nothing. Love that showed her another person to be, love that taught her how to recognize the rage and not be consumed by it.

There was something distinctly American about it all, a fundamental difference in perspective and place–in how they saw themselves in the world. And this was what made it so American–not that they felt compassion for mistreated workers three continents away, workers they had never seen or known, whose world they could not begin to understand, not that they felt guilty about their privilege, no,no not that either, but that they felt the need to do something. That they felt they had to power to do something about it. That was what made it so American. That they felt they had the power to do something–they assumed they had that power. They had been born with it–the ability to change the world–and had never questioned its existence, an assumption so massive as to remain unseen. The power and the responsibility to protect the people they imagined as powerless. The poor defenseless people of the Third World. He felts a sudden queasy sadness. What if they knew what a real revolutionary was? How bloody a real revolution. He looked around, suddenly feeling the need to sit, and saw nothing but their faces, their round wet faces staring back at him. What a violence of spirit not to know the world.

Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privilege, wasn’t it? To think blindness a preferable condition.

He didn’t know what was worse, really, taking down a couple of rioting citizens or having to roll out to the suburbs and smile into plastic faces whose eyes had gone gray as ash.

Because how do you stop a pack of men who have been wounded in the fight, who have scented blood on their adversary and are closing in for the kill? How do you stop a pack of dogs who have lost their minds in fear and rage? You remember that they are not dogs, but men. Frightened and angry human beings.

But then in March '92, the Rodney King verdict came down... And the city had lost its collective mind and was trying to burn itself to the ground. Ju had caught one woman climbing out of the shattered glass of a pharmacy, not like she was the only one, just the one Ju had caught... The woman stood there holding her loot, face devoid of expression. In her hands she held two packages of Pampers, a can of roach spray, and a Pepsi. 'They be climbing over the baby when he asleep,' the woman said by way of explanation. 'The cockroaches, I mean.' Ju took the Pampers and the roach killer. Then she cuffed the lady and out her in the van with the others. Because that was the job.

It was 1999 in America, he had traveled the world for three years, looking for what he didn’t know, and now here he found himself: absolutely allergic to belief, nineteen years old, and totally alone.

Crying alone there in her kitchen, the coffee going cold in her hand because what exactly? Ju staring into the middle distance and the sound of her own weeping competing with the old refrigerator because what kind of courage makes a man. What kind of thing in a man watching it on TV makes him jump off the couch and go racing down there on a bicycle?

Imagine that man [Bobby Green Jr. in LA] seeing something on his TV and standing from his couch to go down there to stop them from beating that truck driver as if what happened on the TV and what happened in the world were somehow related, as if he believed them to be the same.

Four of the cops stood back. As if joined by one brain, one beating heart, they stepped forward together and their batons descended. King knew she would remember, drifting toward sleep some day far removed, the solid thump the wood made falling upon him. It was the sound of the true heartbeat of the world, and once it had been heard, there was no way to stop hearing it. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. and what was it in that long and prolonged instant -- what was it that told her this pain would go on forever? What was happening there was no erasing. There would be no apologies, no forgetting, no reconciliations. Just the opening to the pain that is your friend dead or shot or starved or beaten.

Dr. Wickramsinghe, I don't mean to insult, but what do we have in Sri Lanka? We have a small island nation the size of what, Belgium, that has been at war with itself since 1983. A sixteen-year civil war which shows no signs of abating. A tiny poor nation. What do you possibly have to offer anyone besides warmed-over wage slaves and more of the same?" ..."Listen, we support development. But there are some serious problems with the Sri Lankan way of life. I can assure you that there will be no entry into the WTO for Sri Lanka, nor any free trade agreements with the U.S., unless you enact some serious reforms. Tighten your fucking belt. I believe we have made it very clear that your grossly overfunded health and education will have to go.

What was it he [Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe of Sri Lanka] had heard in the street so many times today? Fair trade, not free trade. Well, the big boys -- the developed countries -- couldn't have either, if none of the former colonies agreed to participate. No factories for their clothes, no mines for their minerals, no markets for their subsidized rice and corn. Nobody to trade with, if that's what you wanted to call it. Charles was going to make sure they didn't go another round. He straightened his suit and stepped from the back door of the Sheraton. He looked down the street to where those city buses were parked. But first he was going to get some people out of jail.