Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

The blue fairy godmother opened the door, and asked her if she'd had a good time, and she said Yes, and No, and It was very interesting to see all the fancy clothes and the fancy plates with fancy cakes and the fancy mirrors and the fancy lights. And then she said, It was even more interesting to see lizards become footwomen and mice become horses.

Such tasks are always the obstacles to becoming, to being set free, or finding love. Carrying out the tasks undoes the curse. Enchantment in these stories is the state of being disguised, displaced in an animal's body or another's identity. Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.

The worst imaginable thing happens to our protagonists: they have a son who grows up to become Dennis Hopper. ("Giantess")

As a scientist, I don't believe that our messages are ignored by the public because people don't care. Many people don't have a science background or find it challenging to stay engaged in a technical debate that can be really alienating

Introspection is often portrayed as an indoor, solitary thing, the monk in his cell, the writer at her desk.

forth. You deny the relationship between cause

With red-rimmed eyes and a wavering voice, he said, "I want you to know that I am sorry. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to understand this." I held the gaze of a man softened by humility, and gently said, "It's all right. You are here now. It's not too late." Change happens gradually, then suddenly. It's never too late to be part of the social movement that will help heal our world.

But we are free together or slaves together.

Walking the streets can be a form of social engagement, even of political action when we walk in concert, as we do in uprisings, demonstrations, and revolutions, but it can also be a means of inducing reverie, subjectivity, and imagination

at the poles themselves, there are not 365 days per year but one long night and one long stretch of light, and the sun rises once in the spring and sets once in the fall.

It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war.

Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis, in fairy tales and sometimes in actuality.

The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers often resonate most.

And things continue to change in interesting and sometimes even auspicious ways.

Disaster myths are not politically neutral, but rather work systematically to the advantage of elites. Elites cling to the panic myth because to acknowledge the truth of the situation would lead to very different policy prescriptions than the ones currently in vogue.

often mild distraction that moves the imagination forward, not uninterrupted concentration.

Their opposite is the equator, where every day and every night of the year is exactly twelve hours long. The farther north or south you go, the longer summer days and winter nights get. In Iceland, each day of spring was several minutes longer than the one before, so that in May the days

It was breathtaking to realize that in the labyrinth, metaphors and meanings could be conveyed spatially. That when you seem farthest from your destination is when you suddenly arrive is a very pat truth in words, but a profound one to find with your feet.

But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling. Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a crackling twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its center.

for pilgrims, walking is work.

Another metaphorical moral seems built into these two structures, for the maze offers the confusions of free will without a clear destination, the labyrinth an inflexible route to salvation.

It's hard to say what difference we make, but we meet people who are hungry, people who bless us, and people who turn away because they're busy shooting up, or crack has taken away their appetites, or suffering has driven them mad. Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan's new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people.

The man, in other words, framed the situation as one in which his chosen victim had no rights and liberties, while he had the right to control and punish her. This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

this administration has been in effect a slow-motion coup, in how it gained power and how it exercises power, violating the rule of law and the standards of the office a little and then a little more and a little more, profiting and wrecking as they go