Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Though patriarchy often claims a monopoly on rationality and reason, those committed to it will discount the most verifiable, coherent, ordinary story told by a woman and accept any fantastical account by a man, will pretend sexual violence is rare and false accusations common, and so forth.”

— Rebecca Solnit

302. “I think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.”

— Rebecca Solnit

303. “To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.”

— Rebecca Solnit

304. “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

305. “A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.”

— Rebecca Solnit

306. “There’s more that we need to be liberated from: maybe a system that prizes competition and ruthlessness and short-term thinking and rugged individualism, a system that serves environmental destruction and limitless consumption so well – that arrangement you can call capitalism. It embodies the worst of machismo while it destroys what’s best on Earth. More men fit into it better, but it doesn’t really serve any of us.”

— Rebecca Solnit

307. “The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story of the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else. Only when the honey turns to dust are you free.”

— Rebecca Solnit

308. “Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It’s so common to live in a place without truly knowing its history, its systems, and the people who are different from you and who move through different versions of the city.”

— Rebecca Solnit

309. “Even if we can’t completely comprehend, we might care.”

— Rebecca Solnit

310. “Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”

— Rebecca Solnit

311. “Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communications and corporate backroom deals.”

— Rebecca Solnit

312. “I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.”

— Rebecca Solnit

313. “Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves being hopeful and motivated and keeping eyes on the prize ahead. Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don’t need to or can’t go down it. You can. We have.”

— Rebecca Solnit

314. “When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live.”

— Rebecca Solnit

315. “The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.”

— Rebecca Solnit

316. “We die all the time to avoid being killed.”

— Rebecca Solnit

317. “Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?”

— Rebecca Solnit

318. “I’ve been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.”

— Rebecca Solnit

319. “Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.”

— Rebecca Solnit

320. “You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. 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

321. “It wasn’t surprising and it wasn’t quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine’s corpse was and urged me to see her at the funeral chapel. This with her cigarettes still in my ashtray, her hair still in my brush, her clothes still in my car, her voice still in my ears, so soon after we’d been looking at ourselves together in my mirror and she the more lithe, the more fluidly beautiful of the two.”

— Rebecca Solnit

322. “Cynicism is, first of all, a style of presenting oneself, and more than anything, cynics take pride in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both of those things.”

— Rebecca Solnit

323. “Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.”

— Rebecca Solnit

324. “After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas...”

— Rebecca Solnit

325. “The current President’s verbal abuse of language itself – with his slurred, sloshing semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday, no matter what else he’s serving, he’s always serving meaninglessness.”

— Rebecca Solnit

326. “But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were.”

— Rebecca Solnit

327. “This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.”

— Rebecca Solnit

328. “Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about.”

— Rebecca Solnit

329. “Disaster shocks us out of slumber, but only skillful efforts keeps us awake.”

— Rebecca Solnit

330. “Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.”

— Rebecca Solnit

331. “But ignorance is one form of tolerance, whether it’s pretending we live in a colorblind society or one in which misogyny is some quaint old thing we’ve gotten over.”

— Rebecca Solnit

332. “Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society.”

— Rebecca Solnit

333. “Society’s recipes for fulfillment seem to cause a great deal of unhappiness, both in those who are stigmatized for being unable or unwilling to carry them out and in those who obey but don’t find happiness.”

— Rebecca Solnit

334. “The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined.”

— Rebecca Solnit

335. “Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful.”

— Rebecca Solnit

336. “In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they’re more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters.”

— Rebecca Solnit

337. “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

338. “Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together. Surely the mindset of those who think they need to win, to dominate, to punish, to reign supreme must be terrible and far from free, and giving up this unachievable pursuit would be liberatory.”

— Rebecca Solnit

339. “And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive, to hover between two zones of punishment in space that was itself so thin that perhaps it never existed, trying to find some impossible balance of being desirable to those we desired and being safe from those we did not.”

— Rebecca Solnit

340. “Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.”

— Rebecca Solnit

341. “Making a poem is like making a chair; a poem is as real as a chair and sometimes more useful.”

— Rebecca Solnit

342. “It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...”

— Rebecca Solnit

343. “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 distance between us and the object of desire that fills in the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation in its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance?”

— Rebecca Solnit

344. “Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”

— Rebecca Solnit

345. “Surely the mindset of those who think they need to win, to dominate, to punish, to reign supreme must be terrible and far from free, and giving up this unachievable pursuit would be liberatory.”

— Rebecca Solnit

346. “Political awareness without activism means looking at the devastation, your face turned toward the center of things. Activism can generate hope because in itself it constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at the center to face the wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side.”

— Rebecca Solnit

347. “What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether.”

— Rebecca Solnit

348. “What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.”

— Rebecca Solnit

349. “It takes a fictionalized or invented excursion to buy a pencil in the winter dusk of London as an excuse to explore darkness, wandering, invention, the annihilation of identity, the enormous adventure that transpires in the mind while the body travels a quotidian course.”

— Rebecca Solnit

350. “I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home.”

— Rebecca Solnit