Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.”

— Rebecca Solnit

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost.”

— Rebecca Solnit

59. “Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

61. “Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience.”

— Rebecca Solnit

62. “The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honorable and informed life requires examining others’ lives, not just one’s own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others. And if we do, we know that nobody is nobody.”

— Rebecca Solnit

63. “The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do.”

— Rebecca Solnit

64. “The courts have scoffed at the reproduction and child-raising argument against marriage equality. And the conservatives have not mounted what seems to be their real objection: that they wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles.”

— Rebecca Solnit

65. “The two most basic goals of social utopias are to eliminate deprivation – hunger, ignorance, homelessness – and to forge a society in which no one is an outsider, no one is alienated.”

— Rebecca Solnit

66. “Time always wins; our victories are only delays; but delays are sweet, and a delay can last a whole lifetime.”

— Rebecca Solnit

67. “A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.”

— Rebecca Solnit

68. “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.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

70. “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

71. “Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light.”

— Rebecca Solnit

72. “Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”

— Rebecca Solnit

73. “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

74. “The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.”

— Rebecca Solnit

75. “This is why I pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

77. “Love is a constant negotiation, a constant conversation; to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort. It is an arena in which you are not in control, because someone else also has rights and decisions; it is a collaborative process; making love is at its best a process in which those negotiations become joy and play.”

— Rebecca Solnit

78. “We are entering an era of heightened disaster, thanks to climate change. Being prepared for disaster will mean being prepared to sift truth from rumour, and being prepared to adjust our worldview.”

— Rebecca Solnit

79. “Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible. Perfectionists can find fault with anything, and no one has higher standards in this regard than leftists.”

— Rebecca Solnit

80. “The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

82. “The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach.”

— Rebecca Solnit

83. “The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation Never to get lost is not to live.”

— Rebecca Solnit

84. “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”

— Rebecca Solnit

85. “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.”

— Rebecca Solnit

86. “The promenade is a special subset of walking.”

— Rebecca Solnit

87. “Nothing is ever so good that it can’t stand a little revision, and nothing is ever so impossible and broken down that a try at fixing it is out of the question.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

89. “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

— Rebecca Solnit

90. “Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.”

— Rebecca Solnit

91. “The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.”

— Rebecca Solnit

92. “To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once. “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live.”

— Rebecca Solnit

93. “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

94. “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

95. “We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.”

— Rebecca Solnit

96. “Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”

— Rebecca Solnit

97. “Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.”

— Rebecca Solnit

98. “Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born.”

— Rebecca Solnit

99. “When you love someone a lot, they just look like love.”

— Rebecca Solnit

100. “I’ve learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing – though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. There’s a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.”

— Rebecca Solnit