Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays

by Rebecca Solnit

began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life. He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?” So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it.

a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing—though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it;