Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses. No advanced step take by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public, Susan B. Anthony said in 1900. For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized. Or as Mary Beard put it last year, We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.

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.

Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?

Measured over too short a span, change becomes imperceptible; people mistake today's peculiarities for eternal verities.

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.

Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.

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.

What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.

graduated as I turned twenty, and then realized that the world and I were not ready for each other.

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.

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")

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.

Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.

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 in the "war on terror.")

Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.

It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.

Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story. Desire for them is in part a desire for a noble destiny, and beauty can seem like a door to meaning as well as to pleasure.

Young feminists are a thrilling phenomenon: smart, bold, funny defenders of rights and claimers of space—and changers of the conversation.

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.

Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.

Children, Landon said, are good at getting lost, because the key in survival is knowing you're lost: they don't stray far, they curl up in some sheltered place at night, they know they need help.

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go

B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.

Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.