Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male a...

That (labyrinth)...became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you're farthest away when you'r...

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.

When you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns, but not about men

I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.

Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and...

Thanks to demographics, that conservative push is not going to work-the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again- and because genies don't go back into bottles and queer people ar...

I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.

The planting of [orchards] represents a reduction of a complex ecology into the monocultural grid of modern agriculture, and the transformation of a complex symbiosis with the land into the simpler pi...

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for yo...

Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights...

The gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the a...

In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

Goodwill is something you put away like preserves, for a rainy day, for winter, for lean times, and it was moving to find that i had more than I had ever imagined. People gathered from all directions,...

In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.

To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.

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 a...

The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren’t adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology.

The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.