Rebecca Solnit Quotes

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.

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.

You don't have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don't have to drop the pleasures of style

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.

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.

Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.

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...

I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.

... 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.

when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?

You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

...the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.

...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.

Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.

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.

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.

The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.

In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.

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.

Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t.

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.

...I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...

I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.

But 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 a loss.

To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.

the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished.

Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.

Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.

Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?

Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be?

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go

[B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.

I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.

It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.

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.