Top 100 Rebecca Solnit Quotes
#1. There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
Rebecca Solnit
#2. Woolf disagrees, saying of the home, "For there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience.
Rebecca Solnit
#3. Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it's something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it.
Rebecca Solnit
#4. But governments and officials are not very good shepherds.
Rebecca Solnit
#5. Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.
Rebecca Solnit
#6. The implication that women as a category are unreliable and that false rape charges are the real issue is used to silence individual women and to avoid discussing sexual violence, and to make out men as the principal victims.
Rebecca Solnit
#7. It takes a fictionalized or invented excursion to buy a pencil in the winter dusk of London as an excuse to explore darkness, wandering, invention, the annihilation of identity, the enormous adventure that transpires in the mind while the body travels a quotidian course.
Rebecca Solnit
#8. To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.
Rebecca Solnit
#9. Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.
Rebecca Solnit
#10. [B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.
Rebecca Solnit
#12. Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
Rebecca Solnit
#13. The backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning. The world has changed profoundly, and it needs to change far more.
Rebecca Solnit
#14. [T]he radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism.
Rebecca Solnit
#15. The Earth we evolved to inhabit is turning into something more turbulent and unreliable at a pace too fast for most living things to adapt to.
Rebecca Solnit
#16. The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection...
Rebecca Solnit
#17. [Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.
Rebecca Solnit
#18. I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan.
Rebecca Solnit
#19. Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of colour?'
Carl Anthony quoted by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit
#20. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.
Rebecca Solnit
#21. Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. It's one of the main causes of death for pregnant women in the United States. At
Rebecca Solnit
#22. A pair of glasses on which the temperature and chance of rain pops up or someone's trying to schedule me for a project or a drink is not going to help with reveries about justice, meaning, and the beautiful deep marine blue of nearly every dusk.
Rebecca Solnit
#23. 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
#24. Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
Rebecca Solnit
#25. A lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with "yes but". Naysaying becomes a habit.
Rebecca Solnit
#26. Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.
Rebecca Solnit
#27. Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.
Rebecca Solnit
#28. Hysteria derives from the Greek word for "uterus," and the extreme emotional state it denotes was once thought to be due to a wandering womb; men were by definition
Rebecca Solnit
#29. The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.
Rebecca Solnit
#30. Fire, brimstone and impending apocalypse have always had great success in the pulpit, and the apocalypse is always easier to imagine than the strange circuitous routes to what actually comes next.
Rebecca Solnit
#31. There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages also fail or how nice or not their bodies are, even the movie-star bodies.
Rebecca Solnit
#32. People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.
Rebecca Solnit
#33. Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life.
Rebecca Solnit
#34. You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.
Rebecca Solnit
#35. Language is power. When you turn "torture" into "enhanced interrogation," or murdered children into "collateral damage," you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care.
Rebecca Solnit
#36. For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.
Rebecca Solnit
#37. I've been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.
Rebecca Solnit
#38. The questions a photographer raises may be more profound than the answers the medium permits.
Rebecca Solnit
#39. Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.
Rebecca Solnit
#40. In English the word 'peripatetic' means 'one who walks habitually and extensively.
Rebecca Solnit
#41. The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
Rebecca Solnit
#42. (...) What's meant by "reproductive rights," of course, is the right of women to control their own bodies. Didn't I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?
Rebecca Solnit
#43. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness.
Rebecca Solnit
#44. Imperialism [ ... ] also meant that the conquerors themselves regarded and instructed their imperial subjects to regard the colonized countries as the outskirts rather than the center of the world.
Rebecca Solnit
#45. Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, "As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability.
Rebecca Solnit
#46. The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.
Rebecca Solnit
#47. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.
Rebecca Solnit
#48. Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples.
Rebecca Solnit
#49. William Stegner ... coined the term 'the geography of hope,' countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few actually entered it.
Rebecca Solnit
#50. A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, it's memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life
Rebecca Solnit
#51. Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live.
Rebecca Solnit
#52. The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation Never to get lost is not to live.
Rebecca Solnit
#53. The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.
Rebecca Solnit
#54. I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
Rebecca Solnit
#55. The exercise of democracy begins as exercise, as walking around, becoming familiar with the streets, comfortable with strangers, able to imagine your own body as powerful and expressive rather than a pawn.
Rebecca Solnit
#56. Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky ... hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.
Rebecca Solnit
#57. ...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.
Rebecca Solnit
#58. In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud. - WALLACE STEVENS, OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS
Rebecca Solnit
#59. We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.
Rebecca Solnit
#60. I think that fear of the mob, the expectation that people, particularly poor and nonwhite people become mobs almost automatically in the absence of coercive authority, is inculcated by the media, the movies, and politicians.
Rebecca Solnit
#61. I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home.
Rebecca Solnit
#62. In that moment, we knew that we were all weird, all in this together, and that addressing our own suffering, while learning not to inflict it on others, is part of the work we're all here to do. So is love, which comes in so many forms and can be directed at so many things.
Rebecca Solnit
#63. The fight for free space-for wilderness and for public space-must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.
Rebecca Solnit
#64. For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.
Rebecca Solnit
#65. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
Rebecca Solnit
#66. I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.
Rebecca Solnit
#67. Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
Rebecca Solnit
#68. Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
Rebecca Solnit
#69. About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country.
Rebecca Solnit
#70. To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on your futures, 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.
Rebecca Solnit
#71. ... a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.
Rebecca Solnit
#72. Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?
Rebecca Solnit
#73. Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.
Rebecca Solnit
#74. The surprises, liberations, and clarifications of travel can sometimes be garnered by going around the block as well as going around the world, and walking travels both near and far.
Rebecca Solnit
#75. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.
Rebecca Solnit
#76. A labyrinth is a symbolic journey ... but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.
Rebecca Solnit
#77. I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?
Rebecca Solnit
#78. Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.
Rebecca Solnit
#79. Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.
Rebecca Solnit
#80. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that's where they may be seen by others, that's not where they're born.
Rebecca Solnit
#82. I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.
Rebecca Solnit
#83. Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished.
Rebecca Solnit
#84. Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
Rebecca Solnit
#85. 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
#86. Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren't so busy surviving.
Rebecca Solnit
#87. Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be "apolitical" is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.
Rebecca Solnit
#88. Generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once. Part
Rebecca Solnit
#89. Utopia is on the horizon," declares Eduardo Galeano. "When I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking." Judeo-Christian
Rebecca Solnit
#90. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.
Rebecca Solnit
#92. Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.
Rebecca Solnit
#94. We are moving into a world of unaccountable and secretive corporations that manage all our communications and work hand in hand with governments to make us visible to them. Our privacy is being strip-mined and hoarded.
Rebecca Solnit
#95. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
Rebecca Solnit
#96. Stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change.
Rebecca Solnit
#97. What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.
Rebecca Solnit
#98. All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
Rebecca Solnit
#99. Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
Rebecca Solnit
#100. Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
Rebecca Solnit
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