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Those obsessed with productivity and injustice often disparage doing nothing, though by doing nothing we usually mean a lot of subtle actions and observations and cultivation of relationships that are doing many kinds of something. It's a doing something who's value and results are not so easily quantified or comodified, and you could argue that any and every evasion of quantify ability and comodifiability is a victory against assembly lines, authorities and oversimplification.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 191)

There is of course, a meaningful difference between the dour (and widespread) position that we are forever starting from scratch because everything is contaminated or corrupt and the position that the good exisits as a kind of seed that needs to be tended more energetically or propagated more widely.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 193)

The trees made the past seem within reach in a way that nothing else could: here were living things that had been planted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees that had been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we were gone. They changed the shape of time.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 6)

...you might prepare for your central mission in life by doing other things that may seem entirely unrelated,and how necessary this may be.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 24)

The flowers also have something to tell us ..., perhaps that there is something beyond the war, just as there's cyclical time, the time of nature as season and processes imagined until recently as outside of historical time. A human being lives in both, as a political actor, a citizen of this place or that, a seat for a mind with opinions and beliefs, but also as a biological entity, eating and sleeping and excreting and breeding, ephemeral like flowers.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 29 - 30)

It is awful to contemplate the misery we inflict on animals before we eat them - which is why, on the whole, we prefer not to think about it. Ironically, this squeamishness isuitself a by-product of the food system. If we hadn't learned ti cook and eat other species,we would never have developed our big complex brains. And without those brains we would not be ablemto comprehend the moral consequences of what we have done.

— Ravenous by Henry Dimbleby, Jemima Lewis (Page 166)

The first couple of times you incorrectly stitch in a pocket lining, it makes you feel honest and hardworking and ready to try again. The third time makes you wonder if you really have what it takes to be a tailor. The fourth time renders you philosophical. Since everything is difficult, I thought, since everything worth doing is aganizing and painstakingly difficult, I might want to choose this thing very carefully.

— Worn: A People’s History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser (Page 297)

Efforts to save handcraft are important, but we must be careful that these efforts treat the disease, and not merely the symptom. The making of good fabric cannot happen in isolation: it cannot haplen in the context of brutal, extractive trade regimes.

— Worn: A People’s History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser (Page 295)