Activism isn’t reliable. It isn’t fast. It isn’t direct either, most of the time, even though the term direct action is used for that confrontation in the streets, those encounters involving lawbreaking and civil disobedience. - P64
Every act is an act of faith, because you don’t know what will happen. You just hope and employ whatever wisdom and experience seems most likely to get you there. - P64
Writing is lonely, it’s an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later. - P65
An essay, a book, is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago, and the response to your words may come long after you’re gone and never reach your ears, if anyone hears you in the first place. - P65
After all, this is how it’s been for so many books that count, books that didn’t shake the world when they first appeared but blossomed later. This is a model for how indirect effect can be, how delayed, how invisible; no one is more hopeful than a writer, no one is a bigger gambler. - P65
Thought becomes action becomes the order of things, but no straight road takes you there. - P65
Nobody can know the full consequences of their actions, and history is full of small acts that changed the world in surprising ways. - P66
There too, as in peace marches, just walking became a form of political speech, one whose directness was a delight after all the usual avenues of politicking: sitting in front of computers, going to meetings, making phone calls, dealing with money. - P66
Arundhati Roy wrote a ravishing novel, The God of Small Things, that catapulted her to international stardom, perhaps so that when she stood up to oppose dams and corporations and corruption and the destruction of the local, people would notice. - P67
Resistance is usually portrayed as a duty, but it can be a pleasure, an education, a revelation. - P68
Dante is told by God what the secret purpose of his life and work was. "Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life." - P69
One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante’s Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi’s despair and his dehumanization. - P69
"Every line we succeed in publishing today—no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it—is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness." - P69
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed, but a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. - P70
History, in Benjamin’s version, is a being to whom things happen, a creature whose despairing lineaments are only redeemed by the sublimity of the imagery. It’s not hard to imagine why Benjamin would picture a tragic, immobilized history, for the storm of the Third Reich was upon him when he wrote his "Theses," and it would destroy him later that year. - P70
And tragedy is seductive. After all, it is beautiful. Survival is funny. It’s the former that makes the greatest art. But I want to propose another angel, a comic angel, the Angel of Alternate History. - P70
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