Brian O'Riley

“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Not all of us are horrid,’ he told her once. ‘Not all of us think of all Indians as our subjects.’ All Indians? Us? She did not know how to explain that she had never trusted these words and did not know what was worse, being a part of all or not, as it seemed the decision had never been hers to make. Nor did she know how to explain that it was not a question of what one or two might think. It had more to do with the patterns inherited, the lies inhabited, though she could not find the words, and so she said nothing.”
― Uzma Aslam Khan, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali

“Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.”
― Philip Levine

“The opposite of peace is not war. The opposite of peace is inertia.”
― Uzma Aslam Khan, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali