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f5fe0fe
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Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nautre, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn't fit into Walden's narrative. He went to jail bo..
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thoreau
wilderness
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Rebecca Solnit |
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786279e
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Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ecefaa8
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To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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32b2446
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Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible. Perfectionists can find fault with anything, and no one has higher standards in this regard than leftists.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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5c64cde
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Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they attempt to control some women, and fear of that violence limits most women in ways they've gotten so used to they hardly notice-and we hardly address. There are exceptions: last summer someone wrote to me to describe a college class in which the students were asked what they do to stay safe from rape...
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Rebecca Solnit |
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4cb696e
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To feel for someone enlarges the self and then the self shares risks and pains.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b1dc79b
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To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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db59b4e
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What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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176ce4b
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I've learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing - though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. There's a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.
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feminism
rebecca-solnit
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Rebecca Solnit |
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292f973
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Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.
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travel
nature
hiking
misogyny
walking
wanderlust
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6399c7a
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He ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a20c872
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Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b8c5f3e
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And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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16809d9
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What we dream of is already present in the world.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6dc82ec
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Everyone has stories of the small coincidence by which their parents met or their grandmother was saved from fire or their grandfather from the grenade, of the choice made by the most whimsical means that led to everything else, whether you're blessed or cursed or both. Trace it back far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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65746fe
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In fact, what is sometimes regarded as an inconsistency in the contemporary right-wing platform--the desire to regulate women's reproductive activity in particular, and sexuality in general, while deregulating everything else--is only inconsistent if you regard women as people. If you regard women as an undifferentiated part of nature, their bodies are just another place a man has every right to go.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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aae8f2e
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There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of one's own virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical because the somber pleasure of condemning things is the most enduring part of that legacy, along with the sense of personal superiority that comes fr..
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politics
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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fb339ab
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Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, "As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability."
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Rebecca Solnit |
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2367e7a
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Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, "As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability." --
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Rebecca Solnit |
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88c8226
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Fire, brimstone and impending apocalypse have always had great success in the pulpit, and the apocalypse is always easier to imagine than the strange circuitous routes to what actually comes next.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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70b0e25
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To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.
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lists
language
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c6df86f
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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 en..
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narrative
place
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d48643a
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Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality.
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travel
nature
misogyny
rape-culture
walking
wanderlust
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Rebecca Solnit |
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dbbf5b6
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This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, o..
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literature
empathy
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b750281
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Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even. There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages also fail or how nice or not their bodies are, even the movie-star bodies. They are the gender that commits the great majority of crime, particularly violent crime, and they are the majority of suicides as well. American men are falling behind wom..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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97de8f8
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One [project of Teddy Cruz's] is titled Living Rooms at the Border. it takes a piece of land with an unused church zoned for three units and carefully arrays on it twelve affordable housing units, a community center (the converted church), offices for Casa in the church's attic, and a garden that can accommodate street markets and kiosks. 'In a place where current regulation allows only one use,' [Cruz} crows, ' we propose five different us..
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architecture
planning
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Rebecca Solnit |
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173a672
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Walking is a pastime rather than an avocation.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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f097801
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The planting of [orchards] represents a reduction of a complex ecology into the monocultural grid of modern agriculture, and the transformation of a complex symbiosis with the land into the simpler piecework or agricultural labour for surplus and export.
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page-55
landscape
orchards
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6659404
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The map of utopias is cluttered nowadays with experiments by other names, and the very idea is expanding. It needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to somethin..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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65e5fd2
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No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.
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travel
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c0c8fdb
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It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.
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inspirational
thought-provoking
utopia
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a0316b2
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We live inside each other's thoughts and works.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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7375243
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I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I'd moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life..
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family-relationships
motherhood
family
coming-of-age
mothers
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Rebecca Solnit |
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828e589
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I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies--though shifting the balance matters--but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others.
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gender
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Rebecca Solnit |
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bb6feee
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Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn't fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that describ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1f0867e
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Some species of trees spread root systems underground that interconnect the individual trunks and weave the individual trees into a more stable whole that can't so easily be blown down in the wind. Stories and conversations are like those roots. ("A Short History of Silence")"
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Rebecca Solnit |
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4f11d52
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Of course false-rape allegations have happened. My friend Astra Taylor points out that the most dramatic examples in this country were when white men falsely accused Black men of assaulting white women. Which means that if you want to be indignant on the subject, you'll need to summon up a more complicated picture of how power, blame, and mendacity actually work. ("Feminism: The Men Arrive")"
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rape
racism
rape-myths
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Rebecca Solnit |
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93e8d01
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A lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with "yes but". Naysaying becomes a habit."
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b7b98d9
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Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity--seeing the troubles in this world--and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3b64080
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Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e4058ab
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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. . . . After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it on herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e6130da
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Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development.
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landscape
wilderness
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Rebecca Solnit |
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924d493
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Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of colour?' Carl Anthony quoted by Rebecca Solnit
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environmental-justice
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ad915f0
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Building a museum case and filling it with types of mussels is one way of knowing mussels; but on the shore, a mussel leads to a crab or a curious stone, which leads to another thing and eventually leads back to mussels, which is another and perhaps a more far-reaching way to know mussels. The sea that always seems like a metaphor, but one that is always moving, cannot be fixed, like a heart that is a like a tongue that is like a mystery th..
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discovery
landscape
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Rebecca Solnit |