Rebecca Solnit Quote

Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self, but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds.

Rebecca Solnit

Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self, but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds.

Tags: meaning, pain

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About Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is an American writer and activist. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.
Solnit is the author of seventeen books, including River of Shadows, which won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism; A Paradise Built in Hell, from 2009, which charts community responses to disaster; The Faraway Nearby, a wide-ranging memoir published in 2013; and Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of essays on feminism and women's writing first published in 2014.