Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
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.
Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointment, betrayal…
The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection…
For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible…
I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good…
What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.
Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.
Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.
The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.
I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.
To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
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.
The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one’s feet is real in a way reading with one’s eyes alone is not.
[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
… a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
[A]though people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholeheartedly. Those qualities are not for sale; they are themselves gifts that can only be given freely, and are in many, many fields.
In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.
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?
I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels
You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.
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.
…explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.
Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.
Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.
The backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning. The world has changed profoundly, and it needs to change far more.
At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.
The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.
In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.
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.
Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it’s something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it.
Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.
Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.
Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t exist.
Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t.
The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.
…I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival…
No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.
Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.
The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
…to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender…
I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.
But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.
To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.
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.
the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.
If it’s not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I’m interested in but don’t yet know. It’s when they explain things to me I know and they don’t that the conversation goes awry.
Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished.
Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.
A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.
The self is…a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on.
In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.
Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.
To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.
Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?
Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be?
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.
We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.
Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.
[B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.
I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.
It’s tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn’t do so before or after.
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.
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.
For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It’s this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you’re some place that’s already interesting. You’re not just between places. Things are happening.
It’s hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.
To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.
We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.