They want you to feel powerless and surrender and let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.
They want you to feel powerless and surrender and let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.
joy is itself an insurrectionary force against the dreariness and dullness and isolation of everyday life.
Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
“Every line we succeed in publishing today—no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it—is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.”
Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
But when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?
Rebecca Solnit • The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness
What startled me about the response to disaster was not the virtue, since virtue is often the result of diligence and dutifulness, but the passionate joy that shined out from accounts by people who had barely survived. These people who had lost everything, who were living in rubble or ruins, had found agency, meaning, community, immediacy in their
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