658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.

While a lot of people want to join the left to react against the mainstream or right, I in many ways react against the left – not a lot of its fundamental commitments, but its often dismal tone, righteousness, defeatism, etc.

I’ve learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing – though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. There’s a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.

Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row – spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences – even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.

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.

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.

What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity.

In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they’re more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters.