28 quotes
A coalition is by definition made up of people who have something in common, not everything in common.
I think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine.
I also read poetry—from Pablo Neruda to Warsan Shire—fairly regularly, and it keeps my sense of what words can do wide open and my sense of beauty awake.
The books I write often feel like the books I wanted to read, but they didn't exist, so I brought them into being.
A labyrinth is a symbolic journey … but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000)
What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.
River of Shadows (2003)
Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society.
Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)
Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style."
This is why I pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation.
Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (2018)
What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.
Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)
Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.
Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (2018)
I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good (p61)
Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)
A better world, yes; a perfect world, never. (p82)
Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)
Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone. (p153)
Men Explain Things to Me (2014)
Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy. (p34)
Men Explain Things to Me (2014)
The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt. (p71)
Men Explain Things to Me (2014)
Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. (p17)
Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)
Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving. (p35)
Men Explain Things to Me (2014)
People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end. (p27)
Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power (2004)
The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas. (p91)
Men Explain Things to Me (2014)