Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the stories that have not. The ghosts outnumber the books by some unimaginably vast sum. Even those who have been audible have often earned the privlage through strategic silences or the inability to hear certain voices, including their own.

Ci, których przera?a równo?? ma??eÅ"ska, sÄ…, na co wskazuje wiele znaków, tak samo przera?eni wizjÄ… równoÅ›ci w parach heteroseksualnych jak równoÅ›ciÄ… par tej samej pÅ'ci.

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.

So #MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening, and even then—as we've seen in the case of Christine Blasey Ford, testifying against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—continuing to be silenced. Just as Gerard Baker did, for changing the story about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Blasey Ford received death threats. One measure of how much power these voices and stories have is how frantically others try to stop them.

Sulkowicz's genius was to make her burden tangible, and in so doing make it something others could share. Solidarity has been a big part of this feminist movement against violence. ("An Insurrectionary Year")

If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.

Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it[.]

Americans have swapped the awkward phrase "same-sex marriage" for the term "marriage equality." The phrase is ordinarily employed to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was.

Woolf gave us limitlessness, impossible to grasp, urgent to embrace, as fluid as water, as endless as desire, a compass by which to get lost.

Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.

Don't mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don't believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it.

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.

Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that's where they may be seen by others, that's not where they're born.

I]t's become standard practice to erect a miniature police state around any globalization summit, and these rights free zones seem to prefigure what corporate globalization promises.

A Presbyterian pastor who had performed a number of such marriages told me, "I remember coming to this realization when I was meeting with same-sex couples before performing their ceremonies when it was legal in California. The old patriarchal default settings did not apply in their relationships, and it was a glorious thing to witness.

I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again.

Some influences stand out like a landmark and leave a traceable legacy with evident heirs. But the most profound influences soak into the cultural landscape like rain and nourish everyday consciousness. Such an influence is likely to go undetected, for it comes to seem the way things have always been.

Most of us would say, if asked, that we live in a capitalist society, but vast amounts of how we live our everyday lives - our interactions with and commitments to family lives, friendships, avocations, membership in social, spiritual and political organizations-are in essence noncapitalist or even anticapitalist, full of things we do for free, out of love, and on principle.

Women are instructed, by the way victims are treated and by the widespread tolerance of an epidemic of violence, that their value is low, that speaking up may result in more punishment, that silence may be a better survival strategy. Sometimes this is called rape culture, but like domestic violence, the term narrows the focus to one act rather than the motive for many; patriarchy is a more useful overarching term.

Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments "when hope and history rhyme

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.

One of the reasons people lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity is the belief that children are the way to fulfill your capacity to love. But there are so many things to love besides one's own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.

If that term confuses you take out the word "sexual" and just focus on "assault," on violence, on the refusal to treat someone as a human being, on the denial of the most basic of human rights, the right to bodily integrity and self-determination.

Women's work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together—maintenance work as the great feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles called it in her Maintenance Art manifesto.