Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

How do we get back to the struggle over the future? I think you have to hope, and hope in this sense is not a prize or a gift, but something you earn through study, through resisting the ease of despair, and through digging tunnels, cutting windows, opening doors, or finding the people who do these things.

when the revolution had taken hold and all the old inevitabilities had been swept aside, when we seized hold of possibility and made it ours. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings,” said LeGuin. It’s the hardest and the best work we could ever do. Now, everything depends on it.

For the desperate, the alternative to hope—and the struggle to realize that hope—is death or privation or torture or a grim future or no future for their children. They are motivated.

Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.

It was, at first, surprising that talking about hope made some people furious.

In the course of an awards speech she noted, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

Americans are good at the mingled complacency and despair that says things cannot change, will not change, and we do not have power to change them. You’d have to be an amnesiac or at least ignorant of history and even current events to fail to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible chang

the more profound revolutions that had unfolded in our lifetimes, around race, gender, sexuality, food, economics, and so much more, the slow incremental victories that begin in the imagination and change the rules.

we need stories that don’t gloss over the ugly damage out there but that don’t portray it as all there is either.