Top 450 Rebecca Solnit Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “There is a serenity in illness that takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough.”

— Rebecca Solnit

403. “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

404. “To feel for someone enlarges the self and then the self shares risks and pains.”

— Rebecca Solnit

405. “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

406. “We were subject to the wonders and frustrations of unpredictability and better able to withstand them because time moved at what would only later seem a gentle flow, like a river across a prairie before the waterfall of acceleration we would all tumble over. We were prepared for encounters with strangers in ways that the digital age would buffer a lot of us from later. It was an era of both more unpredictable contact and more profound solitude.”

— Rebecca Solnit

407. “To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.”

— Rebecca Solnit

408. “The poor have often been subversive just because they don’t always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work.”

— Rebecca Solnit

409. “For it’s particularly when women speak up about sexual crimes that their right and capacity to speak come under attack. It seems almost reflexive at this point, and there is certainly a very clear pattern, one that has a history.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

411. “Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development.”

— Rebecca Solnit

412. “I’m a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.”

— Rebecca Solnit

413. “To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream’s ’everything’s fine.”

— Rebecca Solnit

414. “Mountaineering is always spoken of as though summiting is conquest, but as you get higher, the world gets bigger, and you feel smaller in proportion to it, overwhelmed and liberated by how much space is around you, how much room to wander, how much unknown.”

— Rebecca Solnit

415. “F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” but the summations of the state of the world often assume that it must be all one way or the other, and since it is not all good it must all suck royally. Fitzgerald’s forgotten next sentence is, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

— Rebecca Solnit

416. “Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

417. “It’s hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.”

— Rebecca Solnit

418. “Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four great-grandmothers. Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to construct a linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning.”

— Rebecca Solnit

419. “I have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into the distance so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is traveling.”

— Rebecca Solnit

420. “Sacajawea’s celebrated role on the Lewis and Clark expedition wasn’t primarily that of a navigator; she made their being lost more viable by her knowledge of useful plants, of languages, by the way she and her infant signified to the tribes they encountered that this was not a war party, and perhaps by her sense that all this was home, or somebody’s home.”

— Rebecca Solnit

421. “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.”

— Rebecca Solnit

422. “A lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with “yes but”. Naysaying becomes a habit.”

— Rebecca Solnit

423. “Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan’s new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people. Even.”

— Rebecca Solnit

424. “We are winning,” said the graffiti in Seattle, not “We have won.” It’s a way of telling in which you can feel successful without feeling smug, in which you can feel challenged without feeling defeated.”

— Rebecca Solnit

425. “Gay men and lesbians have already opened up the question of what qualities and roles are male and female in ways that can be liberating for straight people. When they marry, the meaning of marriage is likewise opened up. No hierarchical tradition underlies their union.”

— Rebecca Solnit

426. “Woolf gave us limitlessness, impossible to grasp, urgent to embrace, as fluid as water, as endless as desire, a compass by which to get lost.”

— Rebecca Solnit

427. “I set out to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have great adventures.”

— Rebecca Solnit

428. “A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant.”

— Rebecca Solnit

429. “For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.”

— Rebecca Solnit

430. “If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one’s feet is real in a way reading with one’s eyes alone is not.”

— Rebecca Solnit

431. “You can’t assume that you know why what you’re doing matters. You can’t at least declare failure immediately, because consequences are not always direct, or immediate, or obvious, and the indirect consequences matter.”

— Rebecca Solnit

432. “Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be destruction.”

— Rebecca Solnit

433. “The Appetite Killery” may be the most ironic name, but the most famous inscription read, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may have to go to Oakland.”

— Rebecca Solnit

434. “Without stupid, helpless people to save, heroes become unnecessary. Or rather, without them, it turns out that we are all heroes, even if distinctly unstereotypical ones.”

— Rebecca Solnit

435. “My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I imagined when I was young some science-fiction version of humans becoming brains in jars as a good thing, that our bodies were some sad thing we were mired in rather than instruments of joy, connection, and vitality, the non-negotiable terms of our existence.”

— Rebecca Solnit

436. “Disaster movies and the media continue to portray ordinary people as hysterical or vicious in the face of calamity. We believe these sources telling us we are victims or brutes more than we trust our own experience.”

— Rebecca Solnit

437. “Words bring us together, and silence separates us, leaves us bereft of the help or solidarity or just communion that speech can solicit or elicit.”

— Rebecca Solnit

438. “Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.”

— Rebecca Solnit

439. “Davis calls PTSD living at the whim of your worst memories.”

— Rebecca Solnit

440. “The utilitarian argument against fiestas, parades, carnivals, and general public merriment is that they produce nothing. But they do: they produce society.”

— Rebecca Solnit

441. “I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world is broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.”

— Rebecca Solnit

442. “One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, “Why are you asking that?”

— Rebecca Solnit

443. “The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase what has happened, silence the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorize people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so impossible or dangerous they stop trying, you can perpetuate your crimes.”

— Rebecca Solnit

444. “Nearly all of us would like to be at the end of the story, because to live in the middle of it is to live in suspense and uncertainty about what will happen.”

— Rebecca Solnit

445. “The rights of man” was one of the great phrases of the French Revolution, but it’s always been questionable whether it included the rights of women.”

— Rebecca Solnit

446. “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.”

— Rebecca Solnit

447. “There’s a kind of indignation I know well, when someone feels that the wrong done them has been unrecognized, and a kind of trauma that makes the sufferer into a compulsive storyteller of an unresolved story. You’ll tell it until someone lifts the curse by hearing and believing you.”

— Rebecca Solnit

448. “The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.”

— Rebecca Solnit

449. “You furnish your mind with readings in somewhat the same way you furnish a house with books.”

— Rebecca Solnit

450. “Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, ’were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.”

— Rebecca Solnit