These guys have dreamt up a new way to teach kids different languages — and to say they’ve been successful on Kickstarter would be an understatement.

"How can art make a difference in the world? Should she be teaching the students to write poetry when they need to know how to defend themselves from someone beating them up? Can a memoir by Malcolm X or a novel by García Márquez save them from the daily blows? And what about those who have such learning problems they can't even manage a book by Dr. Seuss, but can weave a spoken story so wondrous, she wants to take notes. Should she give up writing and study something useful like medicine? How can she teach her students to take control of their own destiny? She loves these students. What should she be doing to save their lives?"

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

"She thinks stories are about beauty. Beauty that is there to be admired by anyone, like a herd of clouds grazing overhead. She thinks people are busy working for a living deserve beautiful little stories, because they don't have much time and are often tired. She has in mind a book that can be opened in any page and will make sense to the reader who doesn't know what came for a what comes after."

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

The half-life of love is forever.

Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

But I guess it's true - big things are often just small things that get noticed.

Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“When her hands reached out and poured the tea, it was as if she also poured something into me while I sat there sweating in my cab. It was like she held a string and pulled on it just slightly to open me up. She got in, put a piece of herself inside me, and left again.”

Markus Zusak, I am the Messenger

The arts, the arts, the arts - I don't know why it took me so long to realize how important they are. As a young man, I actually held them in supreme contempt. Now, whenever I think about them, I want to fall on my knees and weep.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

This concentration of my emotions on so small an area had begun as a young lover's happy illusion, had developed into a device to keep me from going insane during the war, and had finally become the permanent axis about which my thoughts revolved.

Kurt Vomnegut

It was going to show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad because survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves - a nation of two.

Kurt Vonnegut

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Kurt Vonnegut

The feeing of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could fee her hand in his again and her her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you in the very quick and quiet way that she had always said it. She said I love you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

Junot Diaz - This Is How You Lose Her

Americans not only come across as patronizing but also often miss the complexity of gender roles in the Islamic world. “I’m a Nobel Peace Prize–winner and a university professor, but if I testify in a court, it won’t take my testimony because I’m a woman,” notes Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer. “Any uneducated man would be taken more seriously…. Iran is a bundle of contradictions. Women can’t testify fully in court, and yet women can be judges presiding over the court. We do have women judges. Any woman who wants to travel abroad needs the consent of her husband. But our vice president is a woman. So when our vice president travels abroad, she needs the consent of her husband. Meanwhile, sixty-five percent of Iranian university students are women, because they do better on entrance exams than men do.

Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky

“One of the greatest moral and policy failures of the last thirty years is the indifference that allowed AIDS to spread around the globe. That indifference arose in part from the sanctimony of the moralizers. In 1983, Patrick Buchanan declared, “The poor homosexuals—they have declared war against nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.” In retrospect, the grossest immorality of the 1980s took place not in San Francisco bathhouses, but in the corridors of power where self-righteous leaders displayed callous indifference to the spread of the disease.”

Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky

“The fistula patient is the modern-day leper,” notes Ruth Kennedy, a British nurse-midwife who worked with Catherine at the fistula hospital. “She’s helpless, she’s voiceless…. The reason these women are pariahs is because they are women. If this happened to men, we would have foundations and supplies coming in from all over the world.”

Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky

“Of course, that’s only the law, and in poor countries laws rarely matter much outside the capital. We sometimes think that Westerners invest too much effort in changing unjust laws and not enough in changing culture, by building schools or assisting grassroots movements. Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn’t the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little... change has to be felt in the culture as well as the legal code.”

Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky