Rebecca Solnit Quotes

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

Georgia O’Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, from the faraway nearby. It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emo...

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.

Ci, których przeraża równość małżeńska, są, na co wskazuje wiele znaków, tak samo przerażeni wizją równości w parach heteroseksualnych jak równością par tej samej płci.

Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and...

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty...

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. Vio...

Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure tha...

In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matt...

I wish that I could put up yesterday’s evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony,...

What’s meant by reproductive rights, of course, is the right of women to control their own bodies. Didn’t I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?

Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situati...

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.

Roads are a record of those who have gone before.

Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walkin...

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.

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Som...

Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointmen...

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.

The language of free speech is used to protect hate speech, itself an attempt to deprive others of their freedom of speech, to scare them into shutting up.