Sreddy

“But in the end, there will still be a morning like this one, full of new beginning and a distant voice will be heard like a memory of before you became people. And the tones of the song will well up, the gentle lull of the first mother. This song yes, indeed will be ours. The memory of a deeper root that they were unable to wretch out of us. All this will happen if we are able to rid ourselves of this time that has made animals out of us. Let us strive to die like the people we no longer are. Let the animal die that this world has turned us into.”
― Mia Couto, Sleepwalking Land

“I'm not a writer, or a teacher, or a priest. I don't know anyone on the island who could be described as a writer. It's an occupation, or a state, that none of us knew anything about. We've never heard of it before. The only people who ever knew how to write on the island were the teacher, the priest and the functionaries who worked in the governor's office, though we never knew what they came to do. What I have spoken of is what I experienced, heard and saw when I was a child. It has never been put down on writing before, because, as I said, I am not a writer; nobody on the island is. If this story becomes known, it will be because of some white people. They came to our island and wanted to know our folk tales, the stories we tell at night before going to sleep.”
― Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, By Night the Mountain Burns

“We must know how to look into images to see that of which they are survivors. So that history, liberated from the pure past (that absolute, that abstraction), might help us to open the present of time.”
― Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz

“[I]t is not ideal to be completely lost in the world of books, for it is not possible to be whole in the refuge of art, of ideas; there is living to be done, living that can be abundant and bittersweet, that can be foggy and unkind, that can be searing and bruising, that can maim and impale, be both meagre and profound.”
― Nthikeng Mohlele, Michael K