Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the are is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

— Rebecca Solnit

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.”

— Rebecca Solnit

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

328. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

330. “It’s not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more productively.”

— Rebecca Solnit

331. “Disaster doesn’t sort us out by preferences; it drags us into emergencies that require we act, and act altruistically, bravely, and with initiative in order to survive or save the neighbors, no matter how we vote or what we do for a living.”

— Rebecca Solnit

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

336. “It described the double bind of women in that moment: they were getting congratulations for being fully liberated and empowered while being punished by a host of articles, reports, and books telling them that, in becoming liberated, they had become miserable; they were incomplete, missing out, losing, lonely, desperate.”

— Rebecca Solnit

337. “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

338. “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

339. “I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

341. “A procession is a participants’ journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.”

— Rebecca Solnit

342. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

344. “What doesn’t go back in the jar or the box are ideas. And revolutions are, most of all, made up of ideas. You can whittle away at reproductive rights, as conservatives have in most states of the union, but you can’t convince the majority of women that they should have no right to control their own bodies.”

— Rebecca Solnit

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “Such speech aims to tranquilize and disempower the populace, to keep us isolated and at home, seduced into helplessness, just as more direct tyrannies seek to terrify citizens into isolation.”

— Rebecca Solnit