top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Some people love their story that much even if it's of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don't know how to stop telling it. Maybe it's about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear-you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Change quotes
"Clever nations are the ones who keep changing their governments! Because power must change hands otherwise it will get spoiled and rot!"
"But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore."
"America was never designed to be fixed forever, but was meant to be fluid and evolving."
"Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing."
"A personality alters itself through a series of self-referential experiences. We are not the same as the day before. Much as a person can never set foot in exactly the same river on any given day, we are different each day. Yesterday made us, but the past cannot contain nor restrain us. We can never mentally scroll backward and be who we used to be. We must move forward in the stream of life until the day that our life force dries up and we return to dust."
"What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain."
"It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes."
"If you don't like how things are, change it! You're not a tree."
Explore more quotes by Rebecca Solnit
"Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. As they did in Egypt, where liberty leading the masses was an earnest young woman in a black hijab."
"Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on."
"In that moment, we knew that we were all weird, all in this together, and that addressing our own suffering, while learning not to inflict it on others, is part of the work we're all here to do. So is love, which comes in so many forms and can be directed at so many things."
"Beauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears."
"For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom."
"I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet."
"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?"
"The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt."
"I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way."
"Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed."
bottom of page