Home > Work > Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters QUOTES

Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters QUOTES

1 " What are human murmurations, I wondered? They are, speaking of choruses, in Horton Hears a Who, the tiny Whos of Whoville, who find that if every last one of them raises their voice, they become loud enough to save their home. They are a million-and-a-half young people across the globe, on March 15, 2019, protesting climate change; coalitions led by First Nations people, holding back fossil fuel pipelines across Canada; the lawyers and others who converged on airports all over the US on January 29, 2017, to protest the Muslim ban. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

2 " We are, as a culture, moving to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

3 " Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter,” says an African proverb. But what if the lionesses write eloquently but the editors prefer the hunters’ version? "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

4 " Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action. Among the virtues that matter are those traditionally considered feminine rather than masculine, more nerd than jock: listening, respect, patience, negotiation, strategic planning, storytelling. But we like our lone and exceptional heroes, the drama of violence and virtue of muscle, or at least that's what we get, over and over, and from it we don't get much of a picture of how change actually happens and what our role in it might be, or how ordinary people matter. "Unhappy the land that needs heros" is a line of Bertolt Brecht's I've gone to dozens of times, but now I'm more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn't know it has lots and what they look like. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

5 " Measured over too short a span, change becomes imperceptible; people mistake today's peculiarities for eternal verities. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

6 " As a girl, I would have liked to have my intelligence and intellectual labors regarded as an unmitigated good and as a source of pride, rather than something I had to handle delicately, lest I upset or offend. Success can contain implicit failure for straight women, who are supposed to succeed as women by making men feel godlike in their might. As Virginia Woolf reflected: "Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Which can come to seem something you're obliged to be and they're entitled to see. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

7 " One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

8 " But ignorance is one form of tolerance, whether it's pretending we live in a colorblind society or one in which misogyny is some quaint old thing we've gotten over. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

9 " Smile," a man orders you, and that's a concise way to say that he owns you; he's the boss; you do as you're told; your face is there to serve his life, not express your own. He's someone; you're no one. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

10 " The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honorable and informed life requires examining others’ lives, not just one’s own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others. And if we do, we know that nobody is nobody. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

11 " Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

12 " If you regard women as people endowed with certain inalienable rights, then heterosexual sex -- as distinct from rape -- has to be something two people do together because both of them want to, but this notion of women as people is apparently baffling or objectionable to hordes of men, not just incels.

Women-as-bodies are sex waiting to happen -- to men -- and women-as-people are annoying gatekeepers getting between men and female bodies, which is why there's a ton of advice about how to trick or overwhelm the gatekeeper. Not just on incel and pick-up artist online forums but as jokey stuff in movies and books, going back to Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Casanova's trophy-taking. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

13 " Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter, "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

14 " Building a movement requires reaching out beyond the people who agree with you. I remember who I was before I gave my life to the movement. Someone was patient with me. Someone saw that I had something to contribute. Someone stuck with me. Someone did the work to increase my commitment. Someone taught me how to be accountable. Someone opened my eyes to the root causes of the problems we face. Someone pushed me to call forward my vision for the future. Someone trained me to bring other people who are looking for a movement into one. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

15 " I find now that most people forget the immense work done around race and gender and sexuality and prisons and power, and that it was, in fact, work—intellectual labor to reject the assumptions built into language, the forces that lift some of us up and push others down, to understand and describe the past and the present and propose new possibilities for the future. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

16 " So #MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening, and even then—as we’ve seen in the case of Christine Blasey Ford, testifying against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—continuing to be silenced. Just as Gerard Baker did, for changing the story about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Blasey Ford received death threats. One measure of how much power these voices and stories have is how frantically others try to stop them. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

17 " Perhaps it’s not that knowledge is power, but that some knowledge has power and some is stripped of the power it deserves. The powerful lack the knowledge; the knowledge lacks the power. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

18 " It was willful inanity, perhaps gleaned from a lifetime of obliviousness about the lives of nobodies; or perhaps it was an insistence that truth, like women, can be bullied into behaving. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters