Sunil Yapa Quotes & Sayings

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? — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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

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. — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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? — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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

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. — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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

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. — Sunil Yapa

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

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. — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa

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? — Sunil Yapa

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. — Sunil Yapa