Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

Alguna vez las revoluciones fueron lo que pensamos que serían?

Conservatives are now largely fighting rearguard actions. They are trying to reassemble a world that never really existed quite as they imagine it (and to the extent that it did, it existed at the expense of all the people—the vast majority of us—forced to disappear, into the closet, the kitchen, segregated space, invisibility and silence). Thanks

Congressional Republicans refused to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act because they objected to the protection it gave immigrants, transgender women, and Native American women.

There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages also fail or how nice or not their bodies are, even the movie-star bodies.

Or maybe there's one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized or hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness.

A study of rape in Asia drew alarming conclusions about its widespread nature but also introduced the term "sexual entitlement" to explain why so much of it takes place. The report's author, Dr. Emma Fulu, said, "They believed they had the right to have sex with the woman regardless of consent." In other words she had no rights. Where'd they learn that? Feminism

Many fear that in disaster we become something other than we normally are—helpless or bestial and savage in the most common myths—or that is who we really are when the superstructure of society crumbles. We remain ourselves for the most part, but freed to act on, most often, not the worst but the best within. The ruts and routines of ordinary life hide more beauty than brutality.

By now you've noticed that Woolf says "I don't know" quite a lot.

Cooking is likewise a mode of transformation and a pleasure to which I often repair, and it sometimes seems so pleasurable because it is the opposite of writing; it engages all the senses; it's immediate and unreproduceable and then it's complete and eaten and over. The tasks are simple, messy, fragrant, and brief, and success and failure are easy to determine.

seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything.

One young woman sheltered with her boyfriend's parents in northern London on the third night of the Blitz. In the long account she wrote the next day, she complained that her hostess made them all tea "just for something to do" and added that "that's one trouble about the raids, people do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.

Books are solitudes in which we meet

Young women are urged to 'never stop picturing their murder'. From childhood onward, we're instructed not to do things. Not go here. Not work there. Not go out at this hour or talk to those people, or wear this dress, or drink this drink, or partake of adventure, independent solitude. Refraining was the only form of safety offered from the slaughter.

During those years at the end of my teens and the beginning of my twenties, I was constantly sexually harassed on the street and sometimes elsewhere. The harassed doesn't convey the menace that was often present.

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.

Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting.

My own task these past twenty years or so of living by words has been to try to find or make a language to describe the subtleties, the incalculables, the pleasures and meanings - impossible to categorize - at the heart of things 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.

it was loans from oil-rich Venezuela that allowed Argentina to pay off its IMF loans early so that it could set its own saner economic policies.

En mi opinión, su habilidad más importante era sencillamente el optimismo que les hacía pensar que iban a sobrevivir y encontrar el camino».

The former marine, David J Morris, author of a book on post traumatic stress disorder, notes that the disorder is far more common and far more rarely addressed among rape survivors than combat veterans.

That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death

The premise was that people were sheep, except when they were wolves, and the solution was to find out how best to herd them. But the sociologists would stand all this on its head.

No perderte nunca es no vivir

Jewish tradition holds that some questions are more significant than their answers.