Loving Your Child Is an Instinct; Shielding Him From the Consequences of What He Did to Another Human Being Is Something Else Entirely — I Learned the Difference at Sixty, at the Door of a Chicken Coop

That is the particular architecture of looking away: it is never done in ignorance.

We always know, a little, in a place we keep quiet.

The people who look away from cruelty are not blind; they are people who have seen just enough to be responsible and have decided that seeing more would cost them something they are not willing to pay.

I paid a plane ticket to Madrid to stop seeing.

And a young woman paid for my not-seeing with years of her life.

I cannot give those years back to her.