Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

54. “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

55. “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

56. “I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan.”

— Rebecca Solnit

57. “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.”

— Rebecca Solnit

58. “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

59. “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

60. “We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.”

— Rebecca Solnit

61. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

63. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

71. “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

72. “Women’s work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together –.”

— Rebecca Solnit

73. “I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods.”

— Rebecca Solnit

74. “I always wanted something more, something else, and if I got it I wanted the next thing, and there was always something to want. Craving gnawed at me. I wanted things so badly, with a desire that was so sharp it gouged me, and the process of wanting often took up far more time and imaginative space than the actual person, place, or thing, or the imaginary thing possessed more power than the real one.”

— Rebecca Solnit

75. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.”

— Rebecca Solnit

87. “Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.”

— Rebecca Solnit

88. “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

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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

92. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

94. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.”

— Rebecca Solnit

100. “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