Sreddy

“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'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

“[I]n the face of every image we have to choose whether, or how, to make it participate in our knowledge and action. We can accept or reject this or that image; take it as a consoling object or as a worrying object; make it ask questions or use it as a ready-made response.”
― 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