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c76b899
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This is what is behind the special relationship between tale and travel, and, perhaps, the reason why narrative writing is so closely bound up with walking. To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain that the author as guide - a guide one may not always agree with our trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take on..
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writing
traveling
walking
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Rebecca Solnit |
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bad8952
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I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays . . ., more personal stuff, essays for artists' books, and more. . . . Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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20f3d2b
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The courts have scoffed at the reproduction and child-raising argument against marriage equality. And the conservatives have not mounted what seems to be their real objection: that they wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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0d05389
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The Eagles's 1977 hit "Hotel California" was a flawless piece of craftsmanship, but it was about upscale fatalism and gilded cages, about the hotel you can check into but never leave. It sounded as though Joan Didion had started writing lyrics. As"
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e73e06e
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Imperialism [...] also meant that the conquerors themselves regarded and instructed their imperial subjects to regard the colonized countries as the outskirts rather than the center of the world.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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8087504
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Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easi..
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travel
nature
roadtrip
wanderlust
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Rebecca Solnit |
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bd95131
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We speak of self-fulfilling prophecies, but any belief that is acted on makes the world in its image. Beliefs matter. And so do the facts behind them. The astonishing gap between common beliefs and actualities about disaster behavior limits the possibilities, and changing beliefs could fundamentally change much more. Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, that paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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77e9973
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Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that's where they may be seen by others, that's not where they're born.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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cfdb39f
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Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e7ba4ce
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It takes a fictionalized or invented excursion to buy a pencil in the winter dusk of London as an excuse to explore darkness, wandering, invention, the annihilation of identity, the enormous adventure that transpires in the mind while the body travels a quotidian course.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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288cb6c
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I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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04ba794
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The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers resonate most.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1b36b6a
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Women's work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together--
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c865500
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Hodanje je susta suprotnost posedovanju. Dozivljaj zemlje hodanjem pretpostavlja pokretljivost, golorukost, sudeonistvo. Nomadi su cesto predstavljali pretnju po nacionalizam zato sto svojim skitnickim zivotom zamagljuju i prevazilaze utvrdene granice kojima se definisu nacije.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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8098429
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The art is not one of forgetting but letting go
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3491510
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Birds arrived. Gulls landed within weeks of the island's emergence, depositing the guano that built a richer soil. Fulmars and guillemots were the first to nest. Snow buntings and graylag geese came, almost ninety bird species in all, and twenty-one species of butterfly and moth. The first bush--a willow--came fifteen years after creation, and five years after the willows, seals were breeding on the young island. The descriptions make Surts..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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79774cc
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That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a ixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately - ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors - coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to e..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a46f60c
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That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately - ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors - coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b36951f
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Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined," writes Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the few prominent figures to address the issue regularly."
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c661ccc
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The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren't adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3c3bf13
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The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a017902
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about sixty-six thousand women are killed by men annually, worldwide, in the specific circumstances they began to call "femicide." Most of them are killed by lovers, husbands, former partners, seeking the most extreme form of containment, the ultimate form of erasure, silencing, disappearance. Such deaths often come after years or decades of being silenced and erased in the home, in daily life, by threat and violence. Some women get erased ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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54702ab
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Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c8e1df0
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This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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8787598
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Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e5f0d2d
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Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature? Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter? Is England gardenlike because Ireland was prisonlike? Does the English pastoral, and the security and abundance it represents, depend on the impoverished land and people of other lands?
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Rebecca Solnit |
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5b9a530
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Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes that's more important to talk about than protecting male comfort levels.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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57c6e06
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I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d4ac009
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Congressional Republicans refused to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act because they objected to the protection it gave immigrants, transgender women, and Native American women. (Speaking of epidemics, one of three Native American women will be raped, and on the reservations 88 percent of those rapes are by non-Native men who know tribal governments can't prosecute them.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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af4b54f
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Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d418492
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For it's particularly when women speak up about sexual crimes that their right and capacity to speak come under attack. It seems almost reflexive at this point, and there is certainly a very clear pattern, one that has a history.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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5c1afd3
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We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day.
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politics
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b28587c
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a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they're more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters. Or as my friend, the criminal-defense investigator who knows insanity and violence intimately, put it, "When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whate..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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639effa
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In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they're more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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26f569e
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About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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fb024f4
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When a corporation writes something off, it accepts the cost. When we write off corporations as inherently corrupt, we accept the cost, too.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a4c2722
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Las mujeres entre los quince y los cuarenta y cuatro anos tienen mas posibilidades de morir o de ser lesionadas o desfiguradas debido a la violencia masculina que debido al cancer, la malaria y los accidentes de trafico juntos>>,
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feminicide
feminicidio
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Rebecca Solnit |
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f9523d1
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Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future,
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e57012e
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Gay men and lesbians have already opened up the question of what qualities and roles are male and female in ways that can be liberating for straight people. When they marry, the meaning of marriage is likewise opened up. No hierarchical tradition underlies their union.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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7f0c570
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Discrimination is training in not identifying or empathizing with someone because they are different in some way, in believing the differences mean everything and common humanity nothing.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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448cdb0
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Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers into it . . . They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world . . . and a library is a Milky Way of worlds. . . . all imaginative, engrossing books are landscapes into which readers vanish.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a5d8984
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a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.
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travel
wanderlust
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Rebecca Solnit |
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22dad1d
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Women are instructed, by the way victims are treated and by the widespread tolerance of an epidemic of violence, that their value is low, that speaking up may result in more punishment, that silence may be a better survival strategy. Sometimes this is called rape culture, but like domestic violence, the term narrows the focus to one act rather than the motive for many; patriarchy is a more useful overarching term.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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277cb6b
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Society's recipes for fulfillment seem to cause a great deal of unhappiness, both in those who are stigmatized for being unable or unwilling to carry them out and in those who obey but don't find happiness.
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Rebecca Solnit |