From Rebecca Solnit, re-posted from social media (July 7, 2023)

I collect quotes, starting a new document every year I paste them into as I encounter them. The collections go back several years. Here’s a few from 2023’s album.

“We are all here to serve each other. At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge.” – Joy Harjo

“American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don’t see it at first. But understanding comes.” -Teju Cole

“Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes, it made me curious, it made me ask this is not enough for me.” – Ocean Vuong

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: “It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex.”

Masha Gessen interviewing Judith Butler in 2020:

MG: You begin with a critique of individualism “as the basis of ethics and politics alike.” Why is that the starting point?

JB: In my experience, the most powerful argument against violence has been grounded in the notion that, when I do violence to another human being, I also do violence to myself, because my life is bound up with this other life. Most people who are formed within the liberal individualist tradition really understand themselves as bounded creatures who are radically separate from other lives. There are relational perspectives that would challenge that point of departure, and ecological perspectives as well. Our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligations to one another. When we strike at one another, we strike at that very bond.