Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but t… - Rebecca Solnit

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide — a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.

Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality.

… It's hard to say whether it was pain or the past that was being extirpated or whether they were the same thing. The doctors who treated her were unlikely to have experienced such profound instability: disappearing mothers, the vast gap between the medieval Russian-Polish Pale and glittering amnesiac Los Angeles, the three or four languages she left behind and the English she never completely acquired, the annihilation of the world she came from and of the relatives she left behind. Post-traumatic stress disorder is an alternate diagnosis a therapist once proffered for her behavior, a condition that recognized all the kinds of war she survived and a world in which nothing was too far-fetched or terrible to be possible.