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. “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

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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

10. “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

11. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

18. “Credibility is a basic survival tool.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

22. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

24. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

28. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.”

— Rebecca Solnit

34. “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

35. “Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

— Rebecca Solnit

36. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

44. “Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”

— Rebecca Solnit

45. “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

46. “To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide – a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.”

— Rebecca Solnit

47. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

49. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit