Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about wh… - Rebecca Solnit

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

Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.