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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 221bf69 | Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story. Just a.. | roads trails travel | Rebecca Solnit | |
| fa445fc | I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It wanted to be written; it was restless for the racetrack; it galloped along once I sat down at the computer. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 8c1873b | mutual aid and pleasure are linked, that the ties that bind are grounds for celebration as well as obligation. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 207a328 | I picked up a book on wilderness survival by Laurence Gonzalez and found in it this telling sentence: "The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits." His point is that when the two seem incompatible, we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us and plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of ob.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 8c5fcf3 | Words travel, because the word arctic comes from arktos, Greek for bear. Cancer comes from the Greek word for crab, karkinos. Memory, or one of its locations in the brain, the hippocampus, means seahorse. A bestiary is buried in our language. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 1dd90c7 | The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. | creativity self-improvement work | Rebecca Solnit | |
| d1cc320 | The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 6dfc3c6 | If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| ce6d7fa | Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. | Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| f627f06 | Show me a hero and I'll show you a man enslaved by his competence. | thought-provoking | Janny Wurts | |
| de71ecd | His point is that when the two seem incompatible we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us, and so plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness. Gonzalez adds, "Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 26c8701 | Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss. | loss mistakes | Rebecca Solnit | |
| b92d6d6 | I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to acknowledge that although people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholeheartedly. Those qualities are not for sale; they are themselves gifts that can only be given freely, and are in many, many fields. | giving passion work | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 693eecf | The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview--but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 6710f7c | The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of c.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 3a3d99f | So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year--meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11's casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror. (Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides between 9/11 and 2012 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 6692386 | B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears. | tears | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 2d5d0d4 | Disaster doesn't sort us out by preferences; it drags us into emergencies that require we act, and act altruistically, bravely, and with initiative in order to survive or save the neighbors, no matter how we vote or what we do for a living. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 7bb0174 | Hysteria derives from the Greek word for "uterus," and the extreme emotional state it denotes was once thought to be due to a wandering womb; men were by definition" | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 64020e5 | Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our desi.. | environment feminism justice landscape | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 1729531 | Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row - spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences - even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| b11e9c9 | We write history with our feet and with our presece and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep. | history inspirational politics | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 37ae7f2 | Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be de- struction. | perfection politics pragmatism | Rebecca Solnit | |
| b6c7fe2 | Here is how the harmful becomes profitable: That which yesterday was reviled today ends up in Urban Outfitters. The critic Rebecca Solnit has summarized it this way: 'Eat your heart out on a plastic tray,' say the Sex Pistols. Now, we know where to buy the tray and what the heart tastes like. | punk-rock rebellion | Josh Kun | |
| 0ae1424 | When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, 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 a.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| c11ddbe | There is no money in what is aptly called free association: we are instead encouraged by media and advertising to fear each other and regard public life as a danger and a nuisance, to live in secured spaces, communicate by electronic means, and acquire our information from media rather than each other. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| c485c13 | The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story of the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else. Only when the honey turns to dust are you free. | honey love storytelling time | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 069040a | A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| fb3aa3a | I argued that you don't know if your actions are futile; that you don't have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| d31783b | This work will only mater if it's sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the consequences aren't immediate or obvious. They must remember that often when you fail at your immediate objective--to block a nominee or a pipeline or to pass a bill--that, even then, you may have changed the whole framework in ways that make broader change more possible. You ma.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 066babd | Even earthquakes are the consequence of tensions built up over long spans of time, imperceptibly, incrementally. You don't notice the buildup, just the release. You see a sick person, an old person, a dying person, the sight sinks in, and somewhere down the road you change your life. In movies and novels, people change suddenly and permanently, which is convenient and dramatic but not much like life, where you gain distance on something, re.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 710f5a0 | Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 88a2d2a | Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 20f45d1 | Katrina was an extreme version of what goes on in many disasters,wherein how you behave depends on whether you think your neighbors or fellow citizens are a greater threat than the havoc wrought by a disaster or a greater good than the property in houses and stores around you." | solidarity utopias | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 9201f73 | thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 923f470 | The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow," [Woolf] writes. "We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friens know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room." Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce .. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 6f062af | 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. | memory nostalgia old-age travel youth | Rebecca Solnit | |
| cfc8289 | 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. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 3ec31d0 | 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. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| b7a42b0 | 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. | hope politics writing | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 210e402 | What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable. | history hope politics | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 127ad41 | 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. | hope politics | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 225fa38 | Never get old. It's a ridiculously uncomfortable process Ath Creator should be made to find a cure for. | humor | Janny Wurts | |
| 92f8a17 | Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take. | graphic-design visualization | Chip Kidd |