Top 100 Solnit Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: "So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it's also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun." Perfectionism
Elizabeth Gilbert
#3. Here is how the harmful becomes profitable: That which yesterday was reviled today ends up in Urban Outfitters. The critic Rebecca Solnit has summarized it this way: 'Eat your heart out on a plastic tray,' say the Sex Pistols. Now, we know where to buy the tray and what the heart tastes like.
Josh Kun
#4. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.
Rebecca Solnit
#5. There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
Rebecca Solnit
#6. 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
#7. Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined,
Rebecca Solnit
#8. Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
Rebecca Solnit
#9. To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.
Rebecca Solnit
#10. I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.
Rebecca Solnit
#11. Woolf disagrees, saying of the home, "For there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience.
Rebecca Solnit
#12. 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
#13. Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it.
Rebecca Solnit
#14. There's no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.
Rebecca Solnit
#15. But governments and officials are not very good shepherds.
Rebecca Solnit
#16. 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
#17. We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.
Rebecca Solnit
#18. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't.
Rebecca Solnit
#19. 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
#20. In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn.
Rebecca Solnit
#21. The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
Rebecca Solnit
#22. Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.
Rebecca Solnit
#23. The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.
Rebecca Solnit
#24. A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.
Rebecca Solnit
#25. 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
#26. The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and
Rebecca Solnit
#27. Sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do.
Rebecca Solnit
#28. To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.
Rebecca Solnit
#29. The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost.
Rebecca Solnit
#30. Disaster doesn't sort us out by preferences; it drags us into emergencies that require we act, and act altruistically, bravely, and with initiative in order to survive or save the neighbors, no matter how we vote or what we do for a living.
Rebecca Solnit
#31. Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.
Rebecca Solnit
#32. I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.
Rebecca Solnit
#33. Empathy is, first of all, an act of imagination, a storyteller's art
Solnit, Rebecca
#34. The boiling point of water is straightfoward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious.
Rebecca Solnit
#35. [B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.
Rebecca Solnit
#36. The utilitarian argument against fiestas, parades, carnivals, and general public merriment is that they produce nothing. But they do: they produce society. They renew the reasons why we might want to belong and the feeling that we do.
Rebecca Solnit
#38. What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.
Rebecca Solnit
#39. This is what we mean by democracy: that everyone has a voice, that no one gets away with things just because of their wealth, power, race, or gender.
Rebecca Solnit
#40. 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
#41. Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a book to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us.
Rebecca Solnit
#42. The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.
Rebecca Solnit
#43. 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
#44. Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
Rebecca Solnit
#45. I think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.
Rebecca Solnit
#46. He was already telling me about the very important book
with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.
Rebecca Solnit
#47. [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
#48. 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
#49. No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.
Rebecca Solnit
#50. They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
Rebecca Solnit
#51. 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
#52. [Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.
Rebecca Solnit
#53. 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
#54. There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.
Rebecca Solnit
#55. I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.
Rebecca Solnit
#56. There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.
Rebecca Solnit
#57. Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.
Rebecca Solnit
#58. Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.
Rebecca Solnit
#59. Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
Rebecca Solnit
#60. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.
Rebecca Solnit
#61. 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
#62. The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.
Rebecca Solnit
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
Rebecca Solnit
#66. Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
Rebecca Solnit
#67. We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
Rebecca Solnit
#68. Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people.
Rebecca Solnit
#69. Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan's new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people. Even
Rebecca Solnit
#70. Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.
Rebecca Solnit
#71. Still, even now, when a woman says something uncomfortable about male misconduct, she is routinely portrayed as delusional, a malicious conspirator, a pathological liar, a whiner who doesn't recognize it's all in fun, or all of the above.
Rebecca Solnit
#72. A lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with "yes but". Naysaying becomes a habit.
Rebecca Solnit
#73. The Eagles's 1977 hit "Hotel California" was a flawless piece of craftsmanship, but it was about upscale fatalism and gilded cages, about the hotel you can check into but never leave. It sounded as though Joan Didion had started writing lyrics. As
Rebecca Solnit
#74. When you are well, your own body is a sealed country into which you need not explore far, but when you are unwell, there is no denying that you are made up of organs and fluids and chemistry and that the mechanisms by which your body operates are not invincible.
Rebecca Solnit
#75. Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.
Rebecca Solnit
#76. [I]t's become standard practice to erect a miniature police state around any globalization summit, and these rights free zones seem to prefigure what corporate globalization promises.
Rebecca Solnit
#77. 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
#78. The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.
Rebecca Solnit
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. When you don't hear others, you don't imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters.
Rebecca Solnit
#82. Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.
Rebecca Solnit
#83. 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
#84. At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.
Rebecca Solnit
#85. Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook ... But we don't need everyone on board; we don't need one magic person in office; we need ourselves. To act. It's the wind, not the weathervanes.
Rebecca Solnit
#86. The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined.
Rebecca Solnit
#87. Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act.
Rebecca Solnit
#88. The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they risk themselves for others. We improvise the conditions of survival beautifully.
Rebecca Solnit
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't
and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.
Rebecca Solnit
#92. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
Rebecca Solnit
#93. I don't think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it's loved by enough people that I'm grateful and able to keep going.
Rebecca Solnit
#94. Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.
Rebecca Solnit
#95. Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.
Rebecca Solnit
#96. Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life.
Rebecca Solnit
#97. What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether
Rebecca Solnit
#98. Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?
Rebecca Solnit
#99. 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
#100. 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
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