Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

I believe the hatred of abortion is often because it gives women an autonomy and freedom equivalent to that of men, and that hatred is often expressed by people who show no interest in the health of infants or the wellbeing of children. Or women. And at this point, in science, facts, and truth. Their lies pave the way for their laws.

Disruption has been a favorite word of the Tech economy, but old-timers saw homes, communities, traditions, and relationships being disrupted.

Jasne, #NotAllMen - nie ka?dy jest mizoginem czy gwaÅ'cicielem. Nie o to chodzi. Chodzi o to, ?e: #YesAllWomen - wszystkie boimy siÄ™ tych, którzy nimi sÄ…

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present, or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future...Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory, and that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans

and if the stepmother was irredeemable, it's because she's all of us: insatiable, craving and its underbelly, selfishness incarnate. She's who we all are when we feel poor amid plenty.

James's investigation concluded that human beings respond with initiative, orderliness, and helpfulness; they remain calm; and suffering and loss are transformed when they are shared experiences.

Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends.

A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country. Just to be clear: not nine minutes, but nine seconds.

Jeszcze jedno w kwestii Kasandry: niewiara, z jakÄ… spotykaÅ'y siÄ™ jej proroctwa, byÅ'a skutkiem klÄ…twy, którÄ… rzuciÅ' na niÄ… Apollo za to, ?e nie chciaÅ'a uprawia? z nim seksu. W tej historii od poczÄ…tku chodzi o to, ?e tracisz wiarygodno??, kiedy domagasz siÄ™ prawa do wÅ'asnego ciaÅ'a.

Or as my friend, the criminal-defense investigator who knows insanity and violence intimately, put it, "When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it's immersed in—the surrounding culture's illness.

My friend Chip Ward speaks of the tyranny of the quantifiable, of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good, speed an efficiency over enjoyment and quality, the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having.

now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. 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.

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women—of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.

We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.

Writing is lonely, it's an intimate talk with the undead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers , with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later.

In 1963, Betty Friedan published a landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, in which she wrote, "The problem that has no name—which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities—is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.

The implication that women as a category are unreliable and that false rape charges are the real issue is used to silence individual women and to avoid discussing sexual violence, and to make out men as the principal victims.

Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist.

Disaster demonstrates this, since among the factors determining whether you will live or die are the health of your immediate community and the justness of your society.

Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States.

David Morris, in The Evil Hours, his remarkable book on trauma, notes, "Part of trauma's corrosive power lies in its ability to destroy narrative, and . . . stories, written and spoken, have tremendous healing power for both the teller and the listener.

How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.

PomyÅ›lcie, jak wiele czasu i energii mogÅ'ybyÅ›my poÅ›wiÄ™ci? najró?niejszym wa?nym sprawom, gdybyÅ›my tylko nie byÅ'y a? tak zajÄ™te samym przetrwaniem.