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We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Politician
Citizens
Public
Talk
Space
Citizen
Free
Seldom
Everyone
Politicians
Life
Appear

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The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.
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I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
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Credibility is a basic survival tool.
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Books are solitudes in which we meet.
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Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be apolitical is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.
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It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.
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What gets called 'the sixties' left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems the most fundamental and most pervasive in all the ensuing changes is the loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of science, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness.
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Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.
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For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.
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I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
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You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.
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Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.
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We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.
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People are actually very good at being communists in the sense that they instantly abandon capitalism, that they love these relationships of mutual aid, because the astonishing thing about disasters is that people are often weirdly joyous in them, because they've recovered a sense of agency, a sense of power, etc.
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Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook... But we don't need everyone on board we don't need one magic person in office we need ourselves. To act. It's the wind, not the weathervanes.
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The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they risk themselves for others. We improvise the conditions of survival beautifully.
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There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
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