No Straight Road Takes You There Quotes

“If we can recognize that we don’t know what will happen, that the future does not yet exist but is being made in the present, then we can be moved to participate in making that future. We can be skillful enough to make directed efforts and sophisticated enough to know that results remain unpredictable. Many acts have had a huge positive impact, but not immediately or directly, so learning to look for and value slow and indirect consequences is crucial to recognizing the nature of change.”
― Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

“Howard Zinn, put it: “There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability.”
― Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

“As Audre Lorde said, “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.”
― Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

“There is no alternative to persevering, and that does no require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”
― Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

“A friend recently told me about the Hindu goddess whose name translates as She Who Is Never Not Broken. When I mention this to someone in Bangalore who is well acquainted with that goddess, she responds with, "The whole is finite; in our brokenness we are infinite." I think she means that being perfect, being whole, means being sealed and shut off in some way, being that version of complete that needs and welcomes no more. To be broken is to reach out, to be open, to be incomplete and therefore to welcome outside in. Maybe a break opens up room for yearnings as reaching beyond.”
― Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

“Though the Donner Party included single men and some extended and blended families, the nuclear family was the portable minimum unit for production and reproduction, and westward migration often shriveled social units down to this minimalist formulation. Both Laura Ingalls Wilder, in her Little House on the Prairie series, and Hamlin Garland, in his Son of the Middle Border, recount how their fathers tore their wives and children away from the security and conviviality of extended family into lonely incursions across the West.”
― Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain