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 someo… - Rebecca Solnit

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.

Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.

L.A. Kauffman: I am curious to hear what things are making you most hopeful right now, what things in the landscape you are really fixing on as signs of hope.
Rebecca Solnit: Two things that always come up for me: one is that half the people under 18 in this country are not white. And you see how awesome, like, the Parkland students are, and that this rising generation kind of gets the connections between economics and race and gender. They are not nearly as homophobic as anyone who ever came before them, and a lot of them actually think very fluidly about their own gender and who they are attracted to. So, and that is coupled with the fact—and this is something I have written about, because it does not feel widely enough understood—the Republicans could not have won any of the last many national elections except through massive voter suppression.

Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.