Rebecca Solnit Quotes

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.

Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live.

Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.

As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.

Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.

Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

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.

A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens - to be informed and engaged.

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

Credibility is a basic survival tool.

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.

No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.

It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.

Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.

Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.

Books are solitudes in which we meet.

Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.

People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.

Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.

...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.

Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.

Sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do.

I see disaster everywhere; I also […] see generosity and resistance everywhere.

That's what I'm trying to get over: the idea that anarchism offers a description of equitable relations that go way back rather than a hypothesis of what the future should look like.

I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.

....there are three prerequisites to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints.

...the questions a photographer raises may be more profound than the answers the medium permits.

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.

We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen.

Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

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.

Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't.

Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communications and corporate backroom deals.

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.

I am against resources being controlled by corporations, but that doesn't mean I want them controlled by the state.

There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.

I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.

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.

I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.

I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.