The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever pick… - Rebecca Solnit

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller.

Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful.

People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.