Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and me… - Rebecca Solnit

But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles - not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don't know. And this is grounds to act.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.

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