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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7375243 | 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.. | coming-of-age family family-relationships motherhood mothers | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 828e589 | 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. | gender | Rebecca Solnit | |
| bb6feee | 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.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 1f0867e | 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")" | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 4f11d52 | 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")" | racism rape rape-myths | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 93e8d01 | A lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with "yes but". Naysaying becomes a habit." | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| b7b98d9 | 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. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 3b64080 | 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. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| e4058ab | 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 .. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| e6130da | 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. | landscape wilderness | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 924d493 | 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 | environmental-justice | Rebecca Solnit | |
| ad915f0 | 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.. | discovery landscape | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 98f068b | Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported confidence. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| b815c9b | Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 6654f27 | If it's not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I'm interested in but don't yet know. It's when they explain things to me I know and they don't that the conversation goes awry. | ignorance mansplain mansplaining patriarchal patriarchy | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 0b42152 | Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they've always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it's compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the l.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 4ac01b1 | That (labyrinth)...became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you're farthest away when you're closest, sometimes the only way is the long one. After that careful walking and looking down, the stillness was deeply moving...It was breathtaking to realize that in the labyrinth, metaphors and meanings could be conveyed spatially. That whe.. | goal labyrinth maze path walking words | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 0623c2c | When I was younger, I studied the men I was involved with so carefully that I saw or thought I saw what pain or limitation lay behind their sometimes crummy behavior. I found it too easy to forgive them, or rather to regard them with sympathy at my own expense. It was as though I saw the depths but not the surface, the causes but not the effect. Or them and not myself. I think we call that overidentification, and it's common among women. Bu.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 1ae9627 | 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 continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 58037e6 | Obsessed? I don't know what the word means. I know there were times when I couldn't think of anything else. I used to stay in every weeknight in the hope that he might get free and call me. It felt like I had a disease I didn't want to get rid of. I suppose that's a definition of obsession, yes. | Sarah Dunant | ||
| a12a1c0 | Ambassadors, of course, do not blush. It is a requisite of the job that they can sustain any manner of insult without any visible change at all to their face. | Sarah Dunant | ||
| 4a1c3f9 | Magic is a little like playing the fiddle. It's damn hard to do without hands. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| f9628bf | That living has no value - it's what you do with life that gives it worth. | reality | Michael J. Sullivan | |
| b10df62 | When faced with certain death, running is sensible, but I think a man can make an unhealthy habit of it. Running can take on an importance of its own and become an excuse to avoid living a normal life. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| d06eede | Fulfillment comes from striving to succeed, to survive by your own wits and strength. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 3ef41ac | It doesn't take much to please you, does it, Myron?" "Anton Bulard once wrote, 'When you expect nothing from the world- not the light of the sun, the wet of water, nor the air to breathe- everything is a wonder and every moment a gift." | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 8ee073c | Royce eyed Hadrian with a skeptical expression. "He'll never manage the climb." "Climb?" Hadrian asked. "The treasure room is at the top of the Crown Tower," Arcadius explained. Even Hadrian had heard of that. Even farmers in Hintindar knew of the Crown Tower. Supposedly it was the leftover corner of some ancient but legendary castle. "I'm in good shape. A few stairs aren't going to kill me." "The tower is heavily guarded in every way,.. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 6e6ac4b | That was why nights were so frightening. Without the distraction of light, the doors to other senses were unlocked. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| e47810f | Royce traveled wrapped in his cloak with the weight of the rain collapsing the hood around his head--not a good sign for Thranic and Bernie. Until then, Royce had played the part of the good little sailor, but with the reemergence of the hood, and the loss of his white kerchief, Hadrian knew that role had ended. They had not spoken much since the attack. Not surprisingly, Royce was in no mood for idle discussion. Hadrian guessed that by now.. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 58bdf8a | Royce is a survivor. You've never seen the beast, and he's lived his whole life in its stomach, yet managed not to be digested. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 8e4780a | The meat was bruised, bleeding, and imprisoned in a tight wrapping. And, though I had a six-month respite from thinking about it, so was I. | Susanna Kaysen | ||
| 00542ee | Back then I didn't know that I -- or anyone-- could make a life out of boyfriends and literature. As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have. The result was chronic emptiness and boredom. There were more pernicious results as well: selfloathing, alternating with "inappropriately intense anger with frequent displays of temper..." | Susanna Kaysen | ||
| aadd20f | We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them. | Susanna Kaysen | ||
| e8629df | This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted. | Susanna Kaysen | ||
| a4abdea | I can't come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions they raise. Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. | Susanna Kaysen | ||
| bcc5fb0 | How many girls do you think a seventeen-year-old boy would have to screw to earn the label "compulsively promiscuous"? Three? No, not enough. Six? Doubtful. Ten? That sounds more likely. Probably in the fifteen-to-twenty range, would be my guess--if they ever put that label on boys, which I don't recall their doing. And for seventeen-year-old girls, how many boys?" | Susanna Kaysen | ||
| 79ec245 | The literal Greek translation is "school for naked exercise." Which made toweling off the stationary bike even more important." | A.J. Jacobs | ||
| 417ef27 | You tell them you have a hunger and a thirst. You don't sit at the same table but you have a hunger and a thirst. | A.J. Jacobs | ||
| a792668 | The key is to pump up your righteous anger and mute your petty resentment. I'll be happy if I can get that balance to fifty-fifty. | A. J. Jacobs | ||
| b321b08 | TINA: I'll have to go to the Ministry with what I've got. (a wobble in her voice) It was nice to see you again, Mr. Scamander. She strides from the room, leaving NEWT perplexed and upset. INT. FLAMEL HOUSE, HALLWAY--AFTERNOON JACOB follows TINA into the hall. JACOB: Hey, hold on one second, will you? Well, hold on! Wait! Tina! She leaves. As the front door closes, NEWT appears at the drawing room door. JACOB: (to NEWT) You didn't mention sa.. | newt-scamander tina-goldstein | J.K. Rowling | |
| 116532c | Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him. | social-purpose writers | Edward Abbey | |
| 366eb98 | Fred Bockman is thirty and looks eighteen. Life has left no marks on him, because he hasn't paid much attention to it. | Kurt Vonnegut | ||
| 8d11616 | But i know a lot about the kind of men you mean. They're the same everywhere. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 58ca4d7 | You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside of them," said Meggie..." | writing | Cornelia Funke |