Top 35 Omar El Akkad Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past – the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting.”

— Omar El Akkad

2. “You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”

— Omar El Akkad

3. “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.”

— Omar El Akkad

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

— Omar El Akkad

5. “It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester-perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence-a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?”

— Omar El Akkad

6. “Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.”

— Omar El Akkad

7. “They think there is only so much living to go around.”

— Omar El Akkad

8. “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

9. “Today you are the only boy in the world and tomorrow it will be as though you never existed.”

— Omar El Akkad

10. “Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened.”

— Omar El Akkad

11. “I know how much you have fought and how much you have suffered. You want something the size of your vengeance, Sarat? This, I believe, is the size of your vengeance.”

— Omar El Akkad

12. “There was a freedom in it, a temporary dispersal of the mundane.”

— Omar El Akkad

13. “And what do you think the prerequisite for kindness is? Have you ever tried to be kind to someone better off than you?”

— Omar El Akkad

14. “Every man you ever meet in nothing but the product of what was withheld from him, what he feels owed.”

— Omar El Akkad

15. “Sarat thought about how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that even broken history is history. The stars, cast wrong, must remain that way. It would be more wrong to change them.”

— Omar El Akkad

16. “In this country he felt a great distance from almost all the children he’d met, such that he could think of friendship only as a thing that depended on him being useful.”

— Omar El Akkad

17. “She wanted her to feel love the way a bone feels a break, to make her scream in a language she never even knew she knew, a language deposited from her lips like secrets into the vault of a muffling pillow. She wanted it to hurt, and for Layla to want it to hurt.”

— Omar El Akkad

18. “All her life she’d had little interest in the workings of boys’ minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things.”

— Omar El Akkad

19. “What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?”

— Omar El Akkad

20. “Nativism being a pyramid scheme, I found myself contemptuous of the refugees’ presence in a city already overburdened. At the foot of the docks, we yelled at them to go home, even though we knew home to be a pestilence field. We carried signs calling them terrorists and criminals and we vandalized the homes that would take them in. It made me feel good to do it, it made me feel rooted; their unbelonging was proof of my belonging.”

— Omar El Akkad

21. “My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself.”

— Omar El Akkad

22. “Everyone fights an American war.”

— Omar El Akkad

23. “She seemed so often a compendium of all her past selves, none of whom Vanna could ever interrogate, young women at various forks, turning this way or that. There were swarms of her, and Vanna did not know a single one.”

— Omar El Akkad

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

— Omar El Akkad

25. “But the two kinds of people in this world aren’t good and bad – they’re engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be engines and you will always, always be fuel.”

— Omar El Akkad

26. “You have to grow up, Sarat. You’re not a little girl anymore. Look, just try not to give anybody reason to make fun of you, is all. You’ll make more friends that way.”

— Omar El Akkad

27. “But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester – perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence – a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?”

— Omar El Akkad

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

— Omar El Akkad

29. “She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self defense.”

— Omar El Akkad

30. “You got the sense from being around them that no war in the history of South Carolina had ever ended, that they were still fighting all of them at once.”

— Omar El Akkad

31. “I’m sorry, Sarat.” “Why’d you do it?” she asked me. “I just wanted to know.” “Don’t ever apologize for that,” she said. “That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know.”

— Omar El Akkad

32. “Her anger at the young woman’s stubbornness quickly prompted recollections of all the times she’d found herself on one side or another of these meaningless, bigoted demarcations; all the times she’d been made to feel alien to some stranger’s expectation of what constituted the right and normal world – the color of her skin, the ethnicity of the man she’d chosen to marry, even her tomboy daughter.”

— Omar El Akkad

33. “She held the woman’s hand but the hand was now simply weight. She listened as the men returned north toward the gate from which they’d first entered. They passed close to her tent. It seemed an endless procession, thousands strong. She imagined them not as men, not even as human, but as a dark, daylong season: a primal winter.”

— Omar El Akkad

34. “It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men’s minds.”

— Omar El Akkad

35. “Unlike the river and the bush and the beasts and birds of the natural world, the lipstick did not interest her; it held no promise of adventure.”

— Omar El Akkad