Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters
Rebecca Solnit
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“Measured over too short a span, change becomes imperceptible; people mistake today's peculiarities for eternal verities.”
“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.”
“One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.”
“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.”
“Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware.”
“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.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
social-change, feminism, intelligence, hero, history-time-change, gender-roles, cooperation
