658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance.

Without stupid, helpless people to save, heroes become unnecessary. Or rather, without them, it turns out that we are all heroes, even if distinctly unstereotypical ones

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place without truly knowing its history, its systems, and the people who are different from you and who move through different versions of the city.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't...the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.

To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

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.

the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished.