Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

322. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

334. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

336. “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

337. “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

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. “To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

347. “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

348. “128We want both, to burn it down and be no one and to be recognized by the dog on the daily walk up the drive from work and we get both but never exactly when and how we imagined it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

349. “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

350. “In the fall of 2017, we began to consider anew how violence, hate, and discrimination push people out, and how the stories we have are haunted by the ghosts of the stories we never got.”

— Rebecca Solnit