25 Quotes by Valarie Kaur

Unresolved grief inside a person is tragic; unresolved grief inside a nation is catastrophic.

When we choose to wonder about people we don’t know, when we imagine their lives and listen for their stories, we begin to expand the circle of those we see as part of us. We prepare ourselves to love beyond what evolution requires.

Wonder is the wellspring for love

No one should be asked to feel empathy or compassion for their oppressors. I have learned that we do not need to feel anything for our opponents at all in order to practice love. Love is labor that returns us to wonder—it is seeing another person's humanity, even if they deny their own. We just have to choose to wonder about them.

When we leave people alone with their pain, their alienation becomes the precondition for radicalization.

To break another's bones, to take their life, is to forgo wonder: It is to cut off a part of ourselves that we do not yet know. I choose nonviolence because it is moral and strategic.

On the other side of rage awaits the ability to wonder again at the spinning world.

When suffering constricts the heart, awe stretches it back out, making us more compassionate, more loving, more present.

We evolve our pursuit of justice from retribution - an eye for an eye - to collective liberation.