From Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, on hope and change and activism:

Causes and effects assume history marches forward. but history is not an army.  It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.  Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do…All of that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.  To hope is to gamble.  It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety.  To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

As someone who studies those slow eroding drips of history, I love how Solnit affirms the notion that individuals can create large-scale change. I need to remember this for those days that I feel apathy, and for those moments when I feel small.