Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

And then there is the extravagance of places where summer hardly has darkness and winter hardly has light, as though the light were gambled away or drunk down all in one long exhilarated draught that brings on the long darkness.

This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.

Utopia itself is rarely more than an ideal or an ephemeral pattern on which to shape the real possibilities before us.

La furia y el deseo vienen en un paquete, entremezclados y revueltos en algo que siempre amenaza con transformar el eros en thanatos, amor en muerte, algunas veces literalmente.

But much of what happened after the levees broke didn't have to. It was the result of fear. When Tierney was speaking about elite panic—"fear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities, and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor"—she was talking shortly after Katrina

So, although the debate about the origins of bipedalism is full of detailed descriptions of hip joints and foot bones and geologic dating methods, it is ultimately about sex, landscape, and thinking.

I don't believe in palmistry or any other form of divination, but I believe in stories that come by any means, and in capacities strangers have to be messengers and mirrors in which you see new possibilities.

Generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once.

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence.

Marble lasts, but soil feeds.

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime

Sexual assault, like torture, is an attack on a victim's right to bodily integrity, to self-determination and self-expression. It's annihilatory, silencing. It intends to rub out the voice and rights of the victim, who must rise up out of that annihilation to speak.

The door to this era's potential paradises is hell.

Which means that there may be very nearly a rape a minute in the United States.

Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a boon to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us.

The function of the state and of its structures in such a society are limited only to that which cannot be performed by anyone else. [Quoting Valclad Havel]

Perhaps it's not that knowledge is power, but that some knowledge has power and some is stripped of the power it deserves. The powerful lack the knowledge; the knowledge lacks the power.

It was willful inanity, perhaps gleaned from a lifetime of obliviousness about the lives of nobodies; or perhaps it was an insistence that truth, like women, can be bullied into behaving.

I understand that there is a writer named Jonathan Franzen, but I have not read him.

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.

I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.

Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be "apolitical" is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.

To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.