Quotes About Rebecca Solnit

Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.

Why do such bad questions get predictably asked? Maybe part of the problem is that we have learned to ask the wrong questions of ourselves. Our culture is steeped in a kind of pop psychology whose obsessive question is: Are you happy? We ask it so reflexively that i seems natural to wish that a pharmacist with a time machine could deliver a lifetime supply of antidepressants to Bloomsbury, so that an incomparable feminist prose stylist could be reoriented to produce litters of Woolf babies.

Hysteria derives from the Greek word for "uterus," and the extreme emotional state it denotes was once thought to be due to a wandering womb; men were by definition

Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for the United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.

Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.

a BBC report on a study of rape in Asia. The study concluded that in many cases the motive for rape was the idea that a man has the right to have sex with a woman regardless of her desires. In other words, his rights trump hers, or she has none.

How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.

In 2007, federal law was changed to allow the president to send in army troops to occupy American cities, a huge setback for domestic liberty.)

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase "same-sex marriage" for the term "marriage equality." The phrase is ordinarily employed to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was.