Beth Chambers

“Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“Makes sense,” the young woman remarked. “Down here you live life to the fullest, while up there your life is empty, worthless. You need a lot of real time to buy just a minute of dreams.”
― Serge Brussolo, The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome

“Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority-- it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney-- for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination-- over other people.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own