The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Quotes

“the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately—ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors—coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sue generous explorations.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. As they did in Egypt, where liberty leading the masses was an earnest young woman in a black hijab.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“Reading is also traveling, with the eyes along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a ixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately - ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors - coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sui generis explorations”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“The Eagles’s 1977 hit “Hotel California” was a flawless piece of craftsmanship, but it was about upscale fatalism and gilded cages, about the hotel you can check into but never leave. It sounded as though Joan Didion had started writing lyrics. As”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“The boiling point of water is straightfoward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays . . ., more personal stuff, essays for artists' books, and more. . . . Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren’t adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“wealth and power are also often disasters, with casualties and wreckage. Maybe what often gets called wealth in booms should mostly be imagined as impoverishment of the majority who don’t become wealthy and often become displaced or priced out locally, served up with the collateral damage from the concentration of power, resources, and the control of place.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness