Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

the way wandering on foot can lead to the wandering of imagination

Nobody gets over anything; time doesn't heal any wounds...the landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it's made out of memory and desire...

The point of the essay was never to suggest that I think I am notably oppressed. It was to take these conversations as the narrow end of the wedge that opens up space for men and closes it off for women, space to speak, to be heard, to have rights, to participate, to be respected, to be a full and free human being.

Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to which you are invited, full of friends who are there even when you have no friends. In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture. Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles. Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning.

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or to figure out how to tell yourself in their story.

Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he thought he could take her without asking and without consequences

Or perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, for one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilized in a seat, and a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination.

El feminismo desea y busca cambiar todo el sistema humano; es cierto que muchos hombres ya se han unido a este proyecto, pero cómo beneficia a los hombres y de qué manera el statu quo actual también les daña son temas que merecen una reflexión más profunda.

Despair is also often premature: it's a form of impatience as well as of certainty.

When you have become quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks.

Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate.

Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered.

I find now that most people forget the immense work done around race and gender and sexuality and prisons and power, and that it was, in fact, work—intellectual labor to reject the assumptions built into language, the forces that lift some of us up and push others down, to understand and describe the past and the present and propose new possibilities for the future.

To believe him, you'd have to buy the line that Diallo took one look at his potbellied, 60-something naked body fresh out of the shower and just volunteered to go down on her knees.

The British judge William Blackstone wrote in 1765, in his influential commentary on English common law and, later, American law, "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.

Como el racismo, la misoginia nunca será abordada adecuadamente si se hace solo desde las víctimas. Los hombres que lo asumen también entienden que el feminismo no es un intento de despojar a los hombres de sus derechos, sino una campaña para liberarnos a todos.

What's the matter with manhood? There's something about how masculinity is imagined, about what's praised and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed.

To recognize the momentousness of what has happened is to apprehend what might happen. Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.

botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan.

Waiting until everything looks feasible is too long to wait.

In opening that essay, she wrote, "The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical…." Later in the essay, she adds, "Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactive, stifling. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish.

That circle became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you're farthest away when you're closest, sometimes the only way is the long one.

We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is.

Gay men have redefined and occasionally undermined conventional masculinity—publicly, for many decades—and often been great allies for women.