You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist of history rather than a spectator.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.

- Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams