If the fabric that separates earth and eternity is so threadbare, a chute to hell yawning open beneath your feet at any moment, then it makes sense to name your roads Gethsemane or Golgotha, Sinai or Calvary. Set aside even common land as hallowed. There is no bright line between now and forever.
-Joni Tevis, “The Lay of the Land,” in The World is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse
"Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening."
-My Words to Victor Frankenstein: by Susan Stryker
I sometimes fear that people might think that fascism arrives in fancy dress worn by grotesques and monsters as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis. Fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore your honour, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, clean up the neighbourhood, remind you of how great you once were, clear out the venal and the corrupt, remove anything you feel is unlike you…It doesn’t walk in saying, “Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”
— Michael Rosen
Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.
— Arundhati Roy
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