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"Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
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"We want it visible to showwhen even the most visible joy will reveal itselfonly when we have transformed it within.there's nowhere, my love, the world can existexpect within."
"The best bubbly I ever tasted was laughter."
"No matter wherever you are,share your joy to make this world joyful and better."
"Smile if you want to be happy now, love if you want to be happy forever."
"That was the big lesson for all of us. Everything was going great on paper, but we all became miserable because we were so caught up in the machinery of how you make that happen, it took away the sheer joy."
Joy,
"Eternal joy arises by living in the 'permanent room'. Living in the 'temporary room' gives temporary joy."
Explore more quotes by Rebecca Solnit
"The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. 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."
"You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us."
"Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds."
"Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of."
"Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met."
"Beauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears."
"Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be de- struction."
"Thanks to demographics, that conservative push is not going to work-the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again- and because genies don't go back into bottles and queer people are not going back into the closet and women aren't going to surrender. It's a war, but I don't believe we're losing it, even if we won't win it anytime soon either; rather, some battles are won, some are engaged, and some women are doing really well while others suffer. And things continue to change in interesting and sometimes even auspicious ways."
"When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men."
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