Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?”

— Rebecca Solnit

252. “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

253. “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

254. “We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.”

— Rebecca Solnit

255. “There are those who see despair as solidarity with the oppressed, though the oppressed may not particularly desire that version of themselves, since they may have had a life before being victims and might hope to have one after.”

— Rebecca Solnit

256. “Perhaps walking is best imagined as an ‘indicator species,’ to use an ecologist’s term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.”

— Rebecca Solnit

257. “Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women’s sexuality.”

— Rebecca Solnit

258. “Young feminists are a thrilling phenomenon: smart, bold, funny defenders of rights and claimers of space – and changers of the conversation.”

— Rebecca Solnit

259. “Feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a plan to liberate us all.”

— Rebecca Solnit

260. “Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters. The revolt against this destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favor of subtleties, of pleasures money can’t buy and corporations can’t command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning, of the slow, the meandering, the digressive, the exploratory, the numinous, the uncertain.”

— Rebecca Solnit

261. “Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.”

— Rebecca Solnit

262. “We are, as a culture, moving to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.”

— Rebecca Solnit

263. “Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. As they did in Egypt, where liberty leading the masses was an earnest young woman in a black hijab.”

— Rebecca Solnit

264. “In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.”

— Rebecca Solnit

265. “Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, “As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability.”

— Rebecca Solnit

266. “Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won’t mark you out as special, though your response to it might.”

— Rebecca Solnit

267. “I walk wherever my errands take me.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

269. “To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.”

— Rebecca Solnit

270. “Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, and minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel.”

— Rebecca Solnit

271. “Feminism, as writer Marie Sheer remarked in 1986, “is the radical notion that women are people,” a notion not universally accepted but spreading nonetheless.”

— Rebecca Solnit

272. “You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally.”

— Rebecca Solnit

273. “In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.”

— Rebecca Solnit

274. “Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.”

— Rebecca Solnit

275. “I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...”

— Rebecca Solnit

276. “In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.”

— Rebecca Solnit

277. “While a lot of people want to join the left to react against the mainstream or right, I in many ways react against the left – not a lot of its fundamental commitments, but its often dismal tone, righteousness, defeatism, etc.”

— Rebecca Solnit

278. “How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

279. “Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited... Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”

— Rebecca Solnit

280. “When you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns, but not about men.”

— Rebecca Solnit

281. “The Earth we evolved to inhabit is turning into something more turbulent and unreliable at a pace too fast for most living things to adapt to.”

— Rebecca Solnit

282. “The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. 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

283. “Why do such bad questions get predictably asked? Maybe part of the problem is that we have learned to ask the wrong questions of ourselves. Our culture is steeped in a kind of pop psychology whose obsessive question is: Are you happy? We ask it so reflexively that i seems natural to wish that a pharmacist with a time machine could deliver a lifetime supply of antidepressants to Bloomsbury, so that an incomparable feminist prose stylist could be reoriented to produce litters of Woolf babies.”

— Rebecca Solnit

284. “Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.”

— Rebecca Solnit

285. “The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.”

— Rebecca Solnit

286. “Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row – spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences – even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.”

— Rebecca Solnit

287. “Measured over too short a span, change becomes imperceptible; people mistake today’s peculiarities for eternal verities.”

— Rebecca Solnit

288. “I argued that you don’t know if your actions are futile; that you don’t have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark.”

— Rebecca Solnit

289. “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

290. “Imagining their trajectories, I picture a real road, branching and branching, and I can feel it, shadowy, forested, full of the anxiety and the excitement of choosing, of starting off without quite knowing where you will end up.”

— Rebecca Solnit

291. “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

292. “It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.”

— Rebecca Solnit

293. “I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world was broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.”

— Rebecca Solnit

294. “Reading is also traveling, with the eyes along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.”

— Rebecca Solnit

295. “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.”

— Rebecca Solnit

296. “The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.”

— Rebecca Solnit

297. “The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.”

— Rebecca Solnit

298. “Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.”

— Rebecca Solnit

299. “I wish that I could put up yesterday’s evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony, ten thousand glorious days of clouds that will instead vanish and never be seen again, line them up in jars where they might be admired in the interim and tasted again as needed.”

— Rebecca Solnit

300. “The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism.”

— Rebecca Solnit