Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

130. “There is no money in what is aptly called free association: we are instead encouraged by media and advertising to fear each other and regard public life as a danger and a nuisance, to live in secured spaces, communicate by electronic means, and acquire our information from media rather than each other.”

— Rebecca Solnit

131. “Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It’s a book to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It’s for all of us.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

133. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

135. “For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.”

— Rebecca Solnit

136. “The self is also 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. We make ourselves and in so doing are the gods of the small universe of self and the large world of repercussions.”

— Rebecca Solnit

137. “The Eagles’s 1977 hit “Hotel California” was a flawless piece of craftsmanship, but it was about upscale fatalism and gilded cages, about the hotel you can check into but never leave. It sounded as though Joan Didion had started writing lyrics. As.”

— Rebecca Solnit

138. “You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

139. “But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.”

— Rebecca Solnit

140. “Even getting a restraining order – a fairly new legal tool – requires acquiring the credibility to convince the courts that some guy is a menace and then getting the cops to enforce it. Restraining orders often don’t work anyway.”

— Rebecca Solnit

141. “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

142. “Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”

— Rebecca Solnit

143. “The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas.”

— Rebecca Solnit

144. “One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.”

— Rebecca Solnit

145. “When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters.”

— Rebecca Solnit

146. “To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.”

— Rebecca Solnit

147. “The backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning. The world has changed profoundly, and it needs to change far more.”

— Rebecca Solnit

148. “I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.”

— Rebecca Solnit

149. “Only when the honey turns to dust are you free.”

— Rebecca Solnit

150. “No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.”

— Rebecca Solnit