No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading. Rebecca Solnit More Quotes by Rebecca Solnit More Quotes From Rebecca Solnit I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way. Rebecca Solnit feel future people past It's not that bad things never happen. But there's a pattern in which most people are calm, resourceful, altruistic, and they improvise emergency systems that work really well - whether it's getting the babies out of a collapsed hospital or putting together a community kitchen to feed everybody for the next few months. Rebecca Solnit community together work people Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility. Rebecca Solnit disaster situation trying people To say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inversion of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.' Rebecca Solnit say everything hell vision