Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

People die in this war, but the ideas cannot be erased.

Gonzalez adds, "Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it's easy to see what we want to see.

Her name was Africa. His name was IMF. He set her up to be pillaged, to go without health care, to starve.

Mutual aid [called this in Kropotkin's 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution ] means that every participant is both giver and recipient in acts of care that bind them together, as distinct from the one-way street of charity.

we should resist on principle, even though it might be futile.

There are people for whom there is only one sun in the sky or darkness, and there are those who live in a night filled with stars

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable. Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it;

Woolf is celebrating getting lost, not literally lost as in not knowing how to find your way, but lost as in open to the unknown, and the way that physical space can provide psychic space.

Much of this is done through speech, through telling of one's plight, through being heard, through hearing compassion and understanding in the response of the people you tend to, whom you befriend. Not only women do this, but perhaps women do this more routinely. It's how I cope, or how my community helps me cope, now that I have one.

Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times and in other extraordinary times.

The Pygmalion myth, whereby a woman is turned from insensate sculpture into a living being, happens much more frequently in reverse, as a story of women who don't need help being fully alive and aware confronted with the people who want to reduce them to something less.

The IMF was a predatory force, opening developing countries up to economic assaults from the wealthy North and powerful transnational corporations.

In the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility.

A book without women is often said to be about humanity but a book with women in the foreground is a woman's book.

But disaster doesn't sort us out by preferences; it drags us into emergencies that require we act, and act altruistically, bravely, and with initiative in order to survive or save the neighbors, no matter how we vote or what we do for a living.

my admiration for this fearlessly unapologetic new generation of feminists and human rights activists is vast.

The U.S. Post Office at San Francisco forwarded unstamped mail, often written on scraps and oddments, from the survivors to destinations around the country. ... There were callous and fearful authorities who lashed out, but also institutions such as the post office that just quietly broke the rules to make life a little less disastrous.

Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't— and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.

If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.

The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel.

The study of disasters makes it clear that there are plural and contingent natures—but the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave.

Earlier disaster scholars tended to imagine that in natural disaster, all parties share common interests and goals, but contemporary sociologists see disasters as moments when subterranean conflicts emerge into the open. Tierney said, "Elites fear disruption of the social order, challenges to their legitimacy." Disasters provide both, lavishly.