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Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act.
Rebecca Solnit
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Women gain opportunities in times of upheaval when societal norms break down, allowing anyone to take action.

This quote by Rebecca Solnit emphasizes how revolutions create spaces for individuals, particularly women, to rise and take on significant roles when traditional structures and rules are disrupted. It highlights the potential for agency and action in periods of transformation, suggesting that the breakdown of established norms can lead to greater participation and influence for those previously marginalized.

Themes

WomenRevolutionAgencyActionChangeOpportunity

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about women in leadership, one might say, 'As Rebecca Solnit noted, women often find great roles in revolution, highlighting the importance of agency in times of change.'

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Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
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I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
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We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
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If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
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The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
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Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
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Quote by Rebecca Solnit | QuoteProject