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Rebecca Solnit
57 quotes
“Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else's field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn't stop in any of them on its long route.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. (p5)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Inside the word "emergency" is "emerge"; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters. (p12)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. (p17)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end. (p27)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since the Seattle surprise, it's become standard practice to erect a miniature police state around any globalization summit, and these rights free zones seem to prefigure what corporate globalization promises. (p46)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good (p61)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing is lonely, it’s an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later. An essay, a book, is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago, and the response to your words may come long after you’re gone and never reach your ears, if anyone hears you in the first place. (p64)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A couple of years ago, a friend wrote to urge me to focus on the lyrical end of my writing rather than activism and I wrote back, “What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic, and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated, and studied too, right now.” I could have added that they themselves become forms of resistance; the two are not necessarily separate practices. (p68)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A better world, yes; a perfect world, never. (p82)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The revolutionary days I have been outlining are days in which hope is no longer fixed on the future: it becomes an electrifying force in the present. (p108)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul. (p137)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don't depend on them. ("When We Lost" in 2016 edition)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...as Freire points out, struggle generates hope as it goes along. Waiting until everything looks feasible is too long to wait. ("When We Lost" in 2016 edition)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection. ("False Hope and Easy Despair" in 2016 edition)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of us would say, if asked, that we live in a capitalist society, but vast amounts of how we live our everyday lives - our interactions with and commitments to family lives, friendships, avocations, membership in social, spiritual and political organizations-are in essence noncapitalist or even anticapitalist, full of things we do for free, out of love, and on principle.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden—which is to say that revolution doesn't necessarily look like revolution.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again. (p3)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. (p7)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p9)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender. (p21)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators. (p30)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy. (p34)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p35)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p35)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt. (p71)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas. (p91)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p94)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone. (p153)”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and living species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by its true name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is why I pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(What moves you most in a work of literature?) To recognize a pattern and a meaning and an order in the world you didn't quite see before is exhilarating, and sometimes even exalting, and there is a moral beauty in the actions people perform out of generosity and courage that stirs and fortifies me—it's why I read and write about political activism and public life.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rebecca Solnit: By the Book". The New York Times, 2018.
“I also read poetry—from Pablo Neruda to Warsan Shire—fairly regularly, and it keeps my sense of what words can do wide open and my sense of beauty awake.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rebecca Solnit: By the Book". The New York Times, 2018.
“The books I write often feel like the books I wanted to read, but they didn't exist, so I brought them into being.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rebecca Solnit: By the Book". The New York Times, 2018.
“I think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The 2000 Election Unleashed Disaster on the World. We Can't Let that Happen Again in 2016." The Nation, November 3, 2016.
“Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview—but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty, and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural toil, but more than a few questioned the former, and most, as the gold rushes, confidence men, and lionized millionaires proved, would gladly escape the latter. So the attempt to make Indians into Christian agriculturalists was akin to those contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impoverished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn out, and it is no surprise that they had trouble wearing this cultural certainty so full of holes.”
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source