Rebecca SolnitThinkers

The City is a place of variety and anonymity and conjunction beyond what can know, such that one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, but only to know that one might. Always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.

Friendship is woven with distance, which we should love, since those who do not love each other are not separated.

A Labyrinth is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.

The Library is a sanctuary from the world and a command center onto it. It is a place where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper.

Mansplaining is more than just a conversational inconvenience: it trains women in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

Mansplaining plays into a slippery slope of silencing, crushing young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.

Motherhood is taken to be a key to feminine identity in part based on the wrongheaded belief that children are the way to fulfill your capacity to love. But there are so many things to love besides one's own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.

Prison is anything that severs and alienates... paradise is the reclaiming commons with the fences thrown down.

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.

A Ruin is a representation of what preceded it. The removal of ruins erases meaning and memory.

Zen's essence is captured by the famous parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains.