David Mikael

“Books have the power to create, destroy or change civilizations.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good

“...the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way, the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history this act preserves.”
― Alberto Manguel, Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Books, Reading, and the World

“Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.”
― Mia Couto

“I recalled the famous description of activist campaigns, usually attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Ideas are activists of a sort; first they appear on the shadows and margins, then they’re mocked or reviled, then they come to be what everyone has always known or believed. How they arrived and who scoffed at them are forgotten. Now nearly everyone understands that this continent was inhabited for centuries before the Europeans arrived, knows that the Columbian encounter was violent and ugly, recognizes that native people are still here. Many of the most significant changes are changes of view, incremental and often invisible, both in who brought them about and when they established themselves, but from those changes much flows.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Hidden Wars of the American West