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… - Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit (born June 24, 1961) is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, 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. (p4)
Feminism, as writer Marie Sheer remarked in 1986, “is the radical notion that women are people,” a notion not universally accepted but spreading nonetheless.
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. (p7)
