Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

The body is nothing more than a parcel in transit, a chess piece dropped on another square, it does not move but is moved.

Addressing our own suffering while learning not to inflict it on others is part of the work we're all here to do.

Cómo emprenderás la búsqueda de aquello cuya naturaleza desconoces por completo?».

And yet the experience happens anyway. Again and again I have seen people slip into this realm and light up with joy. The lack of language doesn't prevent them from experiencing it, only from grasping and making something of it.

Every love has its landscape.

the language of free speech is used to protect hate speech, itself an attempt to deprive others of their freedom of speech, to scare them into shutting up.

About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. It's one of the main causes of death for pregnant women in the United States.

Just because the question can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked.

the landscape never looks the same coming and going, so turn around periodically and look at the view you'll see coming back.

In 1990, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported, "Studies of the Surgeon General's office reveal that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender

Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit.

Protector was one face of their power, but destroyer was still the other face. And neither one put your fate in their hands. They protected what was theirs, to protect or destroy and sometimes the plot was about his grief that he'd failed to protect or his revenge against other men and sometimes he'd destroyed her himself. And the story was still about him.

There's entitlement or authoritarianism in all violence. We say a murderer 'took' another's life. 'To take' is to take possession of. It's to steal, to assume the privilege of an owner, to dispose of someone else's life itself as though it were yours to do so. It never is.

Utopia is on the horizon," declares Eduardo Galeano. "When I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking." Judeo-Christian

She was dead even before she was a corpse.

Buddhism takes change as a given and suffering as the inevitable consequence of attachment and then asks what you are going to do about it. Suffering, though, is not the most accurate translation of the Pali word dukkha. Dukkha means sky, ether, or hole, particularly an axle hole. Sukkha was a good axle hole for a wheel, while dukkha was a poor one, one that made the wheel wobble and bump, jolting the load. It could be translated as discord or disturbance, the antithesis of harmony or serenity.

To consider earth holy is to connect the lowest and most material to the most high and ethereal, to close the breach between matter and spirit. It subversively suggests that the whole world might potentially be holy and that the sacred can be underfoot rather than above.

a map written in the darkness of your guts, readable in a cross section of your autopsied heart.

There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering, and of compassion, and you should measure yourself, price yourself, with the same sense of scarcity and finite resources that govern monetary economies, but there is no measure of either.

All Woolf's work as I know it constitutes a sort of Ovidian metamorphosis where the freedom sought is the freedom to continue becoming, exploring, wandering, going beyond. She is an escape artist. In

In comics, the violent death of a woman as a plot device in a story focused on a man was so common that women coined a term for it - fridging, after the 1999 website, women in refrigerators documenting the plethora of gruesome endings for female characters.

Like a life, a journey assumes a shape and a meaning that are only clear afterward, and like a journey, a life requires that you learn to let go of the plan when the actuality departs from it, to embrace what's arriving, let go of what's departing, to move forward and not get stuck. You can cover the same ground with entirely different purposes.

To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.