[b]Robin Wasserman
The world was full of weapons, when you cared to look.[/b]
Also, when you cared to look, there were folks to use them on.
Life is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it’s neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It was the act of witnessing that turned nothing into something, collapsed possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I’d only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities.
Or, as often as not, when you think that no one is watching.
Popularity gives you power only over people who care about being popular. Ostracism gives you power only over those who fear being ostracized.
Not counting all the times this makes no difference.
The world was so much more forgiving of strength when it took on the appearance of weakness.
Not to mention the other way around.
They were kids. Kids don’t care about totalitarianism. For my parents, Prague is picnics on Petrin Hill and homemade knedliky. It’s home. They didn’t notice the tanks in the backyard, the blood in the streets.
Same with the kids in Trumpworld no doubt.
That was the strange thing about translation, speaking someone else’s words in a voice that somehow was and wasn’t your own. You could fool yourself into believing you understood the meaning behind the words, but—as my father had explained long before I was old enough to get it—words and meaning were inseparable. Language shapes thought; I speak, therefore I think, therefore I am.
And all that this either does or does not imply.