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6f062af
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A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.
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travel
youth
memory
old-age
nostalgia
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Rebecca Solnit |
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cfc8289
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Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3ec31d0
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Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one's humanity. And the history of silence is central to women's history.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b7a42b0
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Stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change.
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writing
politics
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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210e402
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What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.
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history
politics
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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127ad41
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Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.
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politics
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e71b3a1
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Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society.
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politics
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d97c339
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Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves," said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word "track" in Tibetan: shul, "a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by - a footprint for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river..
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travel
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Rebecca Solnit |
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13961ee
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Moths and other nocturnal insects navigate by the moon and stars. Those heavenly bodies are useful for them to find their way, even though they never get far from the surface of the earth. But lightbulbs and candles send them astray; they fly into the heat or the flame and die. For these creatures, to arrive is a calamity. When activists mistake heaven for some goal at which they must arrive, rather than an idea to navigate Earth by, they b..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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2a346dc
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What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6982376
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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. Or
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Rebecca Solnit |
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7f1dea2
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I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm, maybe it was the only way she could break away from her mother, maybe Demeter was a bad parent the way that Lear was a bad parent, denying nature, including the nature of children to leave their parents. Maybe Persephone thought Hades was the infinitely cool older man who held the knowledge she sought, maybe she l..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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fc47d38
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Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d8cb67e
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It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...
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nature
travevl
wanderlust
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6a0c958
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In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.--WALLACE STEVENS, "OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS"
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Rebecca Solnit |
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17a0c98
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If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us who are stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in others ways. Still, that se..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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81198f5
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To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.
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writing
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Rebecca Solnit |
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927bf3a
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We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration and then 350 million under strong international pressure)...but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to ..
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politics
disaster
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Rebecca Solnit |
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bc05b5a
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A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country. Just to be clear: not nine minutes, but nine seconds. It's the number-one cause of injury to American women; of the two million injured annually, more than half a million of those injuries require medical attention while about 145,000 require overnight hospitalizations, according to the Center for Disease Control, and you don't want to know about the dentistry needed afterwards. Spouses ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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caece93
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We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6fb5d0d
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I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...
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travel
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Rebecca Solnit |
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539652e
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There's more that we need to be liberated from: maybe a system that prizes competition and ruthlessness and short-term thinking and rugged individualism, a system that serves environmental destruction and limitless consumption so well--that arrangement you can call capitalism. It embodies the worst of machismo while it destroys what's best on Earth. More men fit into it better, but it doesn't really serve any of us.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a0f64ef
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I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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da8a310
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Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d30afb6
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Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c23bb41
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One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.
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travel
golden-gate-bridge
mount-tamalpais
san-francisco
wanderlust
longing
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Rebecca Solnit |
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7d3e341
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To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1709e17
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The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don't add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the faint suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup.
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pacific-ocean
sea
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Rebecca Solnit |
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8e8017a
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If you walk a city, if you love a city, if you put in your miles and years with open heart and mind, the city will reveal itself to you. Maybe it won't become yours, but you will become its - its chronicler, its pilgrim, its ardent lover, its nonnative son or native daughter or defender.
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travel
community
walking
maps
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a5cac05
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world until very recently, married women were addressed by their husbands' names, prefaced by Mrs. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Bronte and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman's genealogy and even her existence.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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12c0ba1
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confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one man. It is easy to name the disappearances of the Dirty War as crimes,
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Rebecca Solnit |
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f556acc
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I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us community, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. The give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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8d7b6d2
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Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, and minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not t..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6ca3813
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Domestic violence, mansplaining, rape culture, and sexual entitlement are among the linguistic tools that redefine the world many women encounter daily and open the way to begin to change it.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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9cf5fee
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Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. Liberation is a contagious project, speaking of birds coming home to roost.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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53f73d8
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Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3b30b6c
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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. I know lovely and amazing heterosexual couples who married in the 1940s and 1950s and every decade since. Their marriages are egalitarian, full of mutuality and generosity. But even people who weren't particularly nasty were deeply unequal in the past. I also know a dece..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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8dcba16
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Even getting a restraining order--a fairly new legal tool--requires acquiring the credibility to convince the courts that some guy is a menace and then getting the cops to enforce it. Restraining orders often don't work anyway.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a8de1dc
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Why do such bad questions get predictably asked? Maybe part of the problem is that we have learned to ask the wrong questions of ourselves. Our culture is steeped in a kind of pop psychology whose obsessive question is: Are you happy? We ask it so reflexively that i seems natural to wish that a pharmacist with a time machine could deliver a lifetime supply of antidepressants to Bloomsbury, so that an incomparable feminist prose stylist coul..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b1bfbae
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The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. 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. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes th..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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35e3673
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You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.
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meaning
power-of-language
word-choice
power-of-words
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a45a031
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The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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5c072e4
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The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them..
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mortality
identity
love
crisis
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b80195b
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Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.
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Rebecca Solnit |