Rebecca Solnit Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Rebecca Solnit on Wise Famous Quotes.
Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished.
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.
...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.
I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?
Up high, biology vanishes to reveal a world shaped by the starker forces of geology and meteorology, the bare bones of the earth wrapped in sky.
We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.
The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren't adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology.
A lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with "yes but". Naysaying becomes a habit.
The animal kingdom has nothing else like this column of flesh and bone always in danger of toppling, this proud unsteady tower.
Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.
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.
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.
I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.
It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.
You don't have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don't have to drop the pleasures of style
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.
To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.
I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...
Mutual aid and pleasure are linked, that the ties that bind are grounds for celebration as well as obligation.
It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.
Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.
Young feminists are a thrilling phenomenon: smart, bold, funny defenders of rights and claimers of space - and changers of the conversation.
The Earth we evolved to inhabit is turning into something more turbulent and unreliable at a pace too fast for most living things to adapt to.
A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.
Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a book to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us.
Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of colour?'
Carl Anthony quoted by Rebecca Solnit
Carl Anthony quoted by Rebecca Solnit
At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.
I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
Walking is a state in which the mind, body, and the world are aligned ... it produces thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.
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.
Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.
The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.
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.
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.
Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.
A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens - to be informed and engaged.
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.
Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.
People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.
What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.
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.
Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness.
Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that's where they may be seen by others, that's not where they're born.
The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
It's the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.
Sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do.
The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and
Just because the question can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked.
I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.