658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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. 86

...in English the word 'peripatetic' means 'one who walks habitually and extensively.

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.

...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.

Los adolescentes se imaginan muriendo jóvenes porque les es más fácil imaginarse la muerte que imaginarse a la persona en la que quizá los conviertan todas las decisiones y responsabilidades de la vida adulta.

Pomyślcie, jak wiele czasu i energii mogłybyśmy poświęcić najróżniejszym ważnym sprawom, gdybyśmy tylko nie były aż tak zajęte samym przetrwaniem.

Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.

But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles - not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don't know. And this is grounds to act.