Ben Ehrenreich Quotes & Sayings

We do not know what is being done in our name. Worse, we do not ask. — Ben Ehrenreich

If they are ignored, [Alice] Callaghan worries, the dangers of handing the streets over to private security forces will only grow. 'Until they begin interfering with the rights of middle-class people,' she says, 'you won't have anybody crying about it. But by then, it will be too late.' — Ben Ehrenreich

For the record, my own loyalties are uncomplicated. I adore few humans more than I love books. I make no promises, but I do not expect to purchase a Kindle or a Nook or any of their offspring. I hope to keep bringing home bound paper books until my shelves snap from their weight, until there is no room in my apartment for a bed or a couch or another human being, until the floorboards collapse and my eyes blur to dim. But the book, bless it, is not a simple thing. — Ben Ehrenreich

[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair. — Ben Ehrenreich

Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss. — Ben Ehrenreich

Memory,' wrote the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, is a process of organizing what to forget. — Ben Ehrenreich

Unanimity makes me itchy. It almost always hides a grave. I started digging. — Ben Ehrenreich