Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.”

— Rebecca Solnit

4. “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

5. “Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.”

— Rebecca Solnit

6. “Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.”

— Rebecca Solnit

7. “A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.”

— Rebecca Solnit

8. “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

9. “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

10. “To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.”

— Rebecca Solnit

11. “Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”

— Rebecca Solnit

12. “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”

— Rebecca Solnit

13. “Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.”

— Rebecca Solnit

14. “To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

— Rebecca Solnit

15. “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”

— Rebecca Solnit

16. “Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.”

— Rebecca Solnit

17. “There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.”

— Rebecca Solnit

18. “Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.”

— Rebecca Solnit

19. “Credibility is a basic survival tool.”

— Rebecca Solnit

20. “A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.”

— Rebecca Solnit

21. “Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

23. “Walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.”

— Rebecca Solnit

24. “I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels.”

— Rebecca Solnit

25. “A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.”

— Rebecca Solnit

26. “We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.”

— Rebecca Solnit

27. “Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware.”

— Rebecca Solnit

28. “The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

— Rebecca Solnit

29. “Roads are a record of those who have gone before.”

— Rebecca Solnit

30. “The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.”

— Rebecca Solnit

31. “A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.”

— Rebecca Solnit

32. “Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.”

— Rebecca Solnit

33. “Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.”

— Rebecca Solnit

34. “Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

36. “Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.”

— Rebecca Solnit

37. “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

38. “A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don’t want.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

40. “What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you?”

— Rebecca Solnit

41. “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.”

— Rebecca Solnit

42. “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter,” says an African proverb. But what if the lionesses write eloquently but the editors prefer the hunters’ version?”

— Rebecca Solnit

43. “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

44. “The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.”

— Rebecca Solnit

45. “We live inside each other’s thoughts and works.”

— Rebecca Solnit

46. “Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it’s always interesting how many people toss the facts.”

— Rebecca Solnit

47. “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

48. “We are all the heroes of our own stories, and on of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them.”

— Rebecca Solnit

49. “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

50. “Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one’s humanity. And the history of silence is central to women’s history.”

— Rebecca Solnit