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How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.Rebecca Solnit
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In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.Rebecca Solnit
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This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Big Old Fortress of Magnificent Me.Rebecca Solnit
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In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. this is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the word or in this case, makes a mess of it. It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you're in trouble and maybe that there's a cover-up.Rebecca Solnit
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To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.Rebecca Solnit
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How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? .. . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.Rebecca Solnit
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Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished.Rebecca Solnit
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I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies–though shifting the balance matters–but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others.Rebecca Solnit