Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't — and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scena… - Rebecca Solnit

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.

Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity — seeing the troubles in this world — and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender. (p21)