Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens.”

— Rebecca Solnit

106. “James Baldwin famously wrote, “If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

109. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

113. “A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways.”

— Rebecca Solnit

114. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

117. “To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

123. “Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.”

— Rebecca Solnit

124. “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.”

— Rebecca Solnit

125. “Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone. The men who get it also understand that feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a campaign to liberate us all.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

127. “This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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128. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

131. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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