Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Nearly all of us would like to be at the end of the story, because to live in the middle of it is to live in suspense and uncertainty about what will happen.”

— Rebecca Solnit

452. “Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters.”

— Rebecca Solnit

453. “Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it’s described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddnly fell into the water, but what if you’re swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?”

— Rebecca Solnit

454. “It was culture, it was particular people and a system that gave them latitude, looked the other way, eroticized, excused, ignored, dismissed, and trivialized. Changing that culture and those conditions seemed to be the only adequate response. It still does. It could have been me who found herself in.”

— Rebecca Solnit

455. “We don’t even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.”

— Rebecca Solnit

456. “The term inspiration is often thought to be about positive and desirable things, and there’s a sentimental image of the muse as a pretty lady who’s the object of the writer’s ardor. For a political writer the inspirations or at least the prods to write are often whatever is most repellent and alarming, and opposition is a stimulant. Stalin was surely Orwell’s principal muse, if not as a personality then as the figure at the center of a terrifying authoritarianism wreathed in lies.”

— Rebecca Solnit

457. “Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, ’were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.”

— Rebecca Solnit

458. “How do you make art when the art that’s all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes?”

— Rebecca Solnit

459. “In a sense these books on walks for their own sakes are the literature of paradise, the story of what can happen when nothing profound is wrong, and so the protagonist – healthy, solvent, uncommitted – can set out seeking minor adventure. In paradise, the only things of interest are our own thoughts, the character of our companions, and the incidents and appearance of the surroundings.”

— Rebecca Solnit

460. “Some men told me they wished someone would sexually harass them, because they seemed to be unable to imagine it as anything but pleasant invitations from attractive people. No one was offering the help of recognizing what I was experiencing or agreeing that I had the right to be safe and free. It was a kind of collective gaslighting.”

— Rebecca Solnit

461. “When you have become quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks.”

— Rebecca Solnit

462. “Like William Morris, he believed that paradise was behind us, in the old ways of life, and in the organic world, rather than ahead of us in an urbanized and industrialized future.”

— Rebecca Solnit

463. “He asked that roses be planted on his grave. When I checked, a few years ago, a scrappy red rose was blooming there.”

— Rebecca Solnit

464. “We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don’t remember how it happened. It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn’t occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse.”

— Rebecca Solnit

465. “Rumor is the first rat to infest a disaster.”

— Rebecca Solnit

466. “A manilla envelope came through the mail slot a few weeks later. I had a little queasiness about meeting that teenager directly, and so I waited several years to open it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

467. “Disaster loosens attachments to routine and convention: “Disaster provides a form of societal shock which disrupts habitual, institutionalized patterns of behavior and.”

— Rebecca Solnit

468. “I wanted language that could be simple and clear when the subject required it, but sometimes clarity requires complexity. I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths, with the occasional scenic detour or pause to take in the view, since a footpath can traverse steep and twisting terrain that a paved road cannot. I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat.”

— Rebecca Solnit

469. “When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug.”

— Rebecca Solnit

470. “If we can recognize that we don’t know what will happen, that the future does not yet exist but is being made in the present, then we can be moved to participate in making that future. We can be skillful enough to make directed efforts and sophisticated enough to know that results remain unpredictable. Many acts have had a huge positive impact, but not immediately or directly, so learning to look for and value slow and indirect consequences is crucial to recognizing the nature of change.”

— Rebecca Solnit

471. “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. But it works both ways. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

472. “To become a person that occasionally, strangers want to reward because they’ve felt I’ve given them something, is an amazement. Once a young woman passing by an outdoor booth where I was signing books, burst into a spontaneous jig at the sight of me. And that might be the pinnacle of my career. To be somehow an occasion for someone else’s exuberance.”

— Rebecca Solnit

473. “Utopia itself is rarely more than an ideal or an ephemeral pattern on which to shape the real possibilities before us. 135.”

— Rebecca Solnit

474. “It matters whether or not people believe the lies, but unbelievable lies wielded by those with power do their own damage. To be forced to live with the lies of the powerful is to be forced to live with your own lack of power over the narrative, which in the end can mean lack of power over anything at all. Authoritarians see truth and fact and history as a rival system they must defeat.”

— Rebecca Solnit

475. “Disagreement can be useful even when its intention is adversarial. Half my muses have been haters.”

— Rebecca Solnit

476. “In the myths, women keep turning into other things because being a woman is too difficult, too dangerous.”

— Rebecca Solnit

477. “They were roses, and they were saboteurs of my own long acceptance of a conventional version of Orwell and invitations to dig deeper. They were questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about injustice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”

— Rebecca Solnit

478. “Opportunistic theft and burglary are, historically, rare in American disasters, rare enough that many disaster scholars consider it one of the “myths” of disaster. Some such opportunism happened in Katrina. The first thing worth saying about such theft is who cares if electronics are moving around without benefit of purchase when children’s corpses are floating in filthy water and stranded grandmothers are dying of heat and dehydration?”

— Rebecca Solnit

479. “The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit