Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

102. “Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don’t depend on them.”

— Rebecca Solnit

103. “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

104. “The art is not one of forgetting but letting go.”

— Rebecca Solnit

105. “The boiling point of water is straightfoward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious.”

— Rebecca Solnit

106. “Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.”

— Rebecca Solnit

107. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

109. “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned...”

— Rebecca Solnit

110. “Books are solitudes in which we meet.”

— Rebecca Solnit

111. “A better world, yes; a perfect world, never.”

— Rebecca Solnit

112. “The self is... a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on.”

— Rebecca Solnit

113. “I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again.”

— Rebecca Solnit

114. “What we dream of is already present in the world.”

— Rebecca Solnit

115. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

117. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

120. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

122. “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

123. “Women’s work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together – maintenance work as the great feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles called it in her Maintenance Art manifesto.”

— Rebecca Solnit

124. “Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t.”

— Rebecca Solnit

125. “Some people love their story that much even if it’s of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don’t know how to stop telling it. Maybe it’s about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear – you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself.”

— Rebecca Solnit

126. “Stories move in from the shadows to the limelight. And though the stage presents the drama of our powerlessness, the shadows offer the secret of our power.”

— Rebecca Solnit

127. “I coined a term a while ago, privelobliviousness, to try to describe the way that being the advantaged one, the represented one, often means being the one who doesn’t need to be aware and, often, isn’t.”

— Rebecca Solnit

128. “This is what we mean by democracy: that everyone has a voice, that no one gets away with things just because of their wealth, power, race, or gender.”

— Rebecca Solnit

129. “What’s blocking action on climate change is what’s blocking action on all the other issues that matter: it would cut into profits. Never mind the deep future, not when what’s at stake is quarterly earnings.”

— Rebecca Solnit

130. “For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It’s this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you’re some place that’s already interesting. You’re not just between places. Things are happening.”

— Rebecca Solnit

131. “I’m grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.”

— Rebecca Solnit

132. “His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was the same old story, but hers was a new one about the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished, that includes all of us, that matters so much, that we will watch but also make and tell in the weeks, months, years, decades to come.”

— Rebecca Solnit

133. “Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.”

— Rebecca Solnit

134. “I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.”

— Rebecca Solnit

135. “As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.”

— Rebecca Solnit

136. “Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.”

— Rebecca Solnit

137. “Inside the word “emergency” is “emerge”; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.”

— Rebecca Solnit

138. “There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.”

— Rebecca Solnit

139. “Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.”

— Rebecca Solnit

140. “Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.”

— Rebecca Solnit

141. “Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.”

— Rebecca Solnit

142. “The fight for free space-for wilderness and for public space-must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.”

— Rebecca Solnit

143. “Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.”

— Rebecca Solnit

144. “For me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive – Mexico City’s big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change.”

— Rebecca Solnit

145. “Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About.”

— Rebecca Solnit

146. “Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.”

— Rebecca Solnit

147. “What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.”

— Rebecca Solnit

148. “A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.”

— Rebecca Solnit

149. “Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people.”

— Rebecca Solnit

150. “I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.”

— Rebecca Solnit