Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ′ Thoreau once remarked of animals, ‘made to carry some portion of our thoughts.’ Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.”

— Rebecca Solnit

202. “Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth – and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.”

— Rebecca Solnit

203. “Of course women’s walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.”

— Rebecca Solnit

204. “Despair is easy, or at least low cost.”

— Rebecca Solnit

205. “My friend Chip Ward speaks of “the tyranny of the quantifiable,” of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having.”

— Rebecca Solnit

206. “Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side.”

— Rebecca Solnit

207. “The moon is profound except when we land on it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

208. “Space – as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience – has vanished.”

— Rebecca Solnit

209. “When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.”

— Rebecca Solnit

210. “There’s a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don’t always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history.”

— Rebecca Solnit

211. “About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country.”

— Rebecca Solnit

212. “It is often mild distraction that moves imagination forward, not uninterrupted concentration. Thinking then works by indirection, sauntering in a roundabout way to places it cannot reach directly.”

— Rebecca Solnit

213. “When a corporation writes something off, it accepts the cost. When we write off corporations as inherently corrupt, we accept the cost, too.”

— Rebecca Solnit

214. “The term ‘politics of prefiguration’ has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it’s a temporary and local place...”

— Rebecca Solnit

215. “After my book Wanderlust came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of my own perceptions and interpretations. On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn’t happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest- in a nutshell, female.”

— Rebecca Solnit

216. “I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it’s clear it’s been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It wanted to be written; it was restless for the racetrack; it galloped along once I sat down at the computer.”

— Rebecca Solnit

217. “People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.”

— Rebecca Solnit

218. “The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden – which is to say that revolution doesn’t necessarily look like revolution.”

— Rebecca Solnit

219. “Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans.”

— Rebecca Solnit

220. “What is the message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves- that the world is wild, that life is unpredictable in its goodness and its danger, that the world is larger than your imagination.”

— Rebecca Solnit

221. “We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn’t sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.”

— Rebecca Solnit

222. “One of the functions of landscape it to correspond to, nurture, and provoke exploration of the landscape of the imagination. Space to walk is also space to think, and I think that’s one thing landscapes give us: places to think longer, more uninterrupted thoughts or thoughts to a rhythm other than the staccato of navigating the city.”

— Rebecca Solnit

223. “Other eras and cultures often asked different questions from the ones we ask now: What is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life? What’s your contribution to the world or your community? Do you live according to your principles? What will your legacy be? What does your life mean? Maybe our obsession with happiness is a way not to ask those other questions, a way to ignore how spacious our lives can be, how effective our work can be, and how far-reaching our love can be.”

— Rebecca Solnit

224. “All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence.”

— Rebecca Solnit

225. “The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.”

— Rebecca Solnit

226. “Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.”

— Rebecca Solnit

227. “I think that fear of the mob, the expectation that people, particularly poor and nonwhite people become mobs almost automatically in the absence of coercive authority, is inculcated by the media, the movies, and politicians.”

— Rebecca Solnit

228. “Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for the United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.”

— Rebecca Solnit

229. “Many heterosexual marriages are childless; many with children break up: they are no guarantee that children will be raised in a house with two parents of two genders. 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

230. “I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture – storytellers? Hermits?”

— Rebecca Solnit

231. “Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving.”

— Rebecca Solnit

232. “The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.”

— Rebecca Solnit

233. “Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.”

— Rebecca Solnit

234. “Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

235. “If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.”

— Rebecca Solnit

236. “It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.”

— Rebecca Solnit

237. “A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens – to be informed and engaged.”

— Rebecca Solnit

238. “The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers resonate most.”

— Rebecca Solnit

239. “It was they who taught me that a conversation even between strangers could be a gift and sport of sorts, a chance for warmth, banter, blessings, humor, that spoken words could be fire at which you warmed yourself.”

— Rebecca Solnit

240. “In that moment, we knew that we were all weird, all in this together, and that addressing our own suffering, while learning not to inflict it on others, is part of the work we’re all here to do. So is love, which comes in so many forms and can be directed at so many things.”

— Rebecca Solnit

241. “There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”

— Rebecca Solnit

242. “Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.”

— Rebecca Solnit

243. “Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined,” writes Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the few prominent figures to address the issue regularly.”

— Rebecca Solnit

244. “Some influences stand out like a landmark and leave a traceable legacy with evident heirs. But the most profound influences soak into the cultural landscape like rain and nourish everyday consciousness. Such an influence is likely to go undetected, for it comes to seem the way things have always been.”

— Rebecca Solnit

245. “Everywhere people are at work to build a better world in which we – and some of the beauty of this world – will be guaranteed to survive. Everywhere they are at war with the forces threatening us and the planet.”

— Rebecca Solnit

246. “The word adult implies that all the people who’ve attained legal majority make up a coherent category, but we are travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go.”

— Rebecca Solnit

247. “I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness.”

— Rebecca Solnit

248. “The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.”

— Rebecca Solnit

249. “If you walk a city, if you love a city, if you put in your miles and years with open heart and mind, the city will reveal itself to you. Maybe it won’t become yours, but you will become its – its chronicler, its pilgrim, its ardent lover, its nonnative son or native daughter or defender.”

— Rebecca Solnit

250. “At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.”

— Rebecca Solnit