1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4050
4051
4052
4053
4054
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f556acc | 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.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 8d7b6d2 | 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.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 6ca3813 | 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. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| b1714b1 | For] decades, researchers have told us that the link between cataclysm and social disintegration is a myth perpetuated by movies, fiction, and misguided journalism. In fact, in case after case, the opposite occurs: In the earthquake and fire of 1906, Jack London observed: "never, in all San Francisco's history, were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror." "We did not panic. We coped," a British psychiatrist recalled af.. | human-nature humanity | Jonathan M. Katz | |
| 9cf5fee | 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. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 53f73d8 | 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. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 3b30b6c | 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.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 8dcba16 | 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. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 000c609 | Except we were there, and I was in a vengeful mood. My cousin was still in Bebbanburg. AEthelhelm was trying to destroy my daughter and her husband. Constantin had humiliated me by driving me from my ancestral land. I had not seen Eadith, my wife, in a month. So someone had to suffer. | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| a8de1dc | 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.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| b1bfbae | 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.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 35e3673 | You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it. | meaning power-of-language power-of-words word-choice | Rebecca Solnit | |
| a45a031 | The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 5c072e4 | 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.. | crisis identity love mortality | Rebecca Solnit | |
| b80195b | 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. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 6580da9 | I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 1679592 | I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good... | hope politics | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 44f3e1d | The truth is that we're drowning in busywork, nonproductive work, everything from "creative" banking and insurance bureaucracies to the pointless shuffling of data and the manufacturing of products designed to be obsolescent almost immediately- and I would argue that a great deal of what we're doing should just stop. Interestingly, people of all sorts are beginning to reconnect to skills and sensibilities that were bulldozed in the frenzy o.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| c303a3a | Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 803f333 | That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social minor to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harrassment and intimidation, online at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear). Havi.. | feminism rebecca-solnit | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 2d6c122 | The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden--which is to say that revolution doesn't necessarily look like revolution. | hope imagination politics | Rebecca Solnit | |
| f87ce78 | Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fin.. | hope politics | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 205e0f2 | More than any other city, [Paris] has entered the paintings and the novels of those under its sway, so that representation and reality reflect each other like a pair of facing mirrors, and walking Paris is often described as reading, as though the city itself were a huge anthology of tales. It exerts a magnetic attraction over its citizens and its visitors, for it has always been the capital of refugees and exiles as well as of France. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| ae91c9f | Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as .. | coming-of-age family family-relationships parents poverty | Rebecca Solnit | |
| c2710d8 | But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 3b3cb97 | After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas... | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| a2000e2 | Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 851a689 | It's the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| ea6a88b | In the fall of 2017, we began to consider anew how violence, hate, and discrimination push people out, and how the stories we have are haunted by the ghosts of the stories we never got. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 46cda9b | 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, 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 trave.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| d2761a6 | The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse "los," meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know." | loss lost rebecca-solnit | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 96f3090 | The current President's verbal abuse of language itself - with his slurred, sloshing semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday, no matter what else he's serving, he's always serving meaninglessness. | trump words | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 118c44a | But we do not choose our deaths. The Norns do that at the foot of Yggdrasil and I imagined one of those three Fates holding the shears above my thread. She was ready to cut, and all that mattered now was to keep tight hold of my sword so that the winged women would take me to Valhalla's feasting-hall. | fate sword valhalla | Bernard Cornwell | |
| 0b71221 | You know what circumcision is, Private? | Bernard Cornwell | ||
| 5e08381 | How often ignorance stings less than knowledge. | knowledge | Janny Wurts | |
| 68fe6b3 | Some gifts of friendship cannot be earned, no matter how hard we try to live up to them. | Janny Wurts | ||
| 7620d0f | But at the end of the day, you can't major in Making Stuff, so it was Art by default. | university | Chip Kidd | |
| 332819f | The direct transfer of artistic gifts is impossible; artistic adaptation takes place through a series of contradictory phases: Shock -- Wonder -- Imitation -- Rejection -- Experimentation -- Possession. | Ken Knabb | ||
| 78218aa | I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all. | Sarah Dunant | ||
| 3426d1d | Either you're standing under your halos, eyes up to heaven, or you're munching apples in their faces and flashing your bush. I'm not even sure they know which they prefer. The best you can do is choose when you change your costume. | Sarah Dunant | ||
| 2ba5214 | And, such was the sound that the chorus made together, that to have been a part of it at all was enough for me. | Sarah Dunant | ||
| f430d41 | Johannes Burchard. The only man in Rome whose face remains the same be it perfume or shit under his nose. | Sarah Dunant | ||
| b317dbb | Any man in love with Cesare is already half in love with his sister. | Sarah Dunant | ||
| b8cf92b | Myron took the moment to sit down on the stone bench behind him and whispered to Hadrian, "You were right. Life outside the abbey is much more exciting than books." | exciting-life real-life | Michael J. Sullivan |