Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable happen quite regularly.”

— Rebecca Solnit

354. “The utilitarian argument against fiestas, parades, carnivals, and general public merriment is that they produce nothing. But they do: they produce society. They renew the reasons why we might want to belong and the feeling that we do.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Rebecca Solnit

361. “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

362. “Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.”

— Rebecca Solnit

363. “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

364. “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

365. “I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.”

— Rebecca Solnit

366. “Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.”

— Rebecca Solnit

367. “Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature? Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter? Is England gardenlike because Ireland was prisonlike? Does the English pastoral, and the security and abundance it represents, depend on the impoverished land and people of other lands?”

— Rebecca Solnit

368. “We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen.”

— Rebecca Solnit

369. “Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn’t really a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women pointed out that, in insisting on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do.”

— Rebecca Solnit

370. “You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center.”

— Rebecca Solnit

371. “In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open onto the impossible.”

— Rebecca Solnit

372. “She regained the voice taken away from her and with it rehumanized her dehumanized self. She spoke words that built a cage around him, erected a monument to his casual malice, words that will likely follow him all his life. Her voice was her power.”

— Rebecca Solnit

373. “Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live.”

— Rebecca Solnit

374. “Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.”

— Rebecca Solnit

375. “In fact, what is sometimes regarded as an inconsistency in the contemporary right-wing platform – the desire to regulate women’s reproductive activity in particular, and sexuality in general, while deregulating everything else – is only inconsistent if you regard women as people. If you regard women as an undifferentiated part of nature, their bodies are just another place a man has every right to go.”

— Rebecca Solnit

376. “Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.”

— Rebecca Solnit

377. “Discrimination is training in not identifying or empathizing with someone because they are different in some way, in believing the differences mean everything and common humanity nothing.”

— Rebecca Solnit

378. “There’s so much other work love has to do in the world.”

— Rebecca Solnit

379. “One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.”

— Rebecca Solnit

380. “Much fuss has been made over the idea of the frontier, as though it were a line advancing east to west, but the West was settled piece meal, and Indians fled in many directions to escape the tightening noose of the railroad lines and towns.”

— Rebecca Solnit

381. “Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

382. “I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to acknowledge that although people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholeheartedly. Those qualities are not for sale; they are themselves gifts that can only be given freely, and are in many, many fields.”

— Rebecca Solnit

383. “If it’s not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I’m interested in but don’t yet know. It’s when they explain things to me I know and they don’t that the conversation goes awry.”

— Rebecca Solnit

384. “We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. 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.”

— Rebecca Solnit

385. “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.”

— Rebecca Solnit

386. “Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.”

— Rebecca Solnit

387. “I don’t think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it’s loved by enough people that I’m grateful and able to keep going.”

— Rebecca Solnit

388. “We have far more than eighty-seven thousand rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated incident.”

— Rebecca Solnit

389. “If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the stories that have not. The ghosts outnumber the books by some unimaginably vast sum. Even those who have been audible have often earned the privlage through strategic silences or the inability to hear certain voices, including their own.”

— Rebecca Solnit

390. “More and more I think of privatisation as being not just about the takeover of resources and power by corporate interests, but as the retreat of citizens to private life and private space, screened from solidarity with strangers and increasingly afraid or even unable to imagine acting in public.”

— Rebecca Solnit

391. “It’s all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.”

— Rebecca Solnit

392. “Alas, many of these long-distance writers are not fascinating thinkers, and it’s a dubious premise that someone who would be dull to walk round the corner with must be fascinating for a six-month trek. To hear about walking from people whose only claim on our attention is to have walked far is like getting one’s advice on food from people whose only credentials come from winning pie-eating contests.”

— Rebecca Solnit

393. “There are other things I’d rather write about, but this affects everything else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. 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

394. “You don’t have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don’t have to drop the pleasures of style.”

— Rebecca Solnit

395. “Or maybe there’s one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essence of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness.”

— Rebecca Solnit

396. “If that term confuses you take out the word “sexual” and just focus on “assault,” on violence, on the refusal to treat someone as a human being, on the denial of the most basic of human rights, the right to bodily integrity and self-determination.”

— Rebecca Solnit

397. “We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day.”

— Rebecca Solnit

398. “His name was privilege, but hers was possibility.”

— Rebecca Solnit

399. “The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we’re meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.”

— Rebecca Solnit

400. “A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country.”

— Rebecca Solnit