Rebecca Solnit

“The promenade is a special subset of walking.”

— Rebecca Solnit

Books are solitudes in which we meet.

— Rebecca Solnit

I walk wherever my errands take me.

— Rebecca Solnit

Roads are a record of those who have gone before.

— Rebecca Solnit

“We live inside each other's thoughts and works.”

— Rebecca Solnit

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.

— Rebecca Solnit

“People die in this war, but the ideas cannot be erased.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“Sometimes, cause and effect are centuries apart”

— Rebecca Solnit

No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.

— Rebecca Solnit

A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.

— Rebecca Solnit

“You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

“Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.”

— Rebecca Solnit

You don't have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don't have to drop the pleasures of style

— Rebecca Solnit

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.

— Rebecca Solnit

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.

— Rebecca Solnit

“Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational…

— Rebecca Solnit

To say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inversion of the…

— Rebecca Solnit

People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way…

— Rebecca Solnit

No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very…

— Rebecca Solnit

Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky… hope is an ax you…

— Rebecca Solnit

A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes that’s more important to talk about than protecting male…

— Rebecca Solnit

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you…

— Rebecca Solnit

The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of…

— Rebecca Solnit

A restlessness has seized hold of many of us, a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we…

— Rebecca Solnit

To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that…

— Rebecca Solnit

“A Presbyterian pastor who had performed a number of such marriages told me, “I remember coming to this realization when I was…

— Rebecca Solnit

Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her…

— Rebecca Solnit

“The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep…

— Rebecca Solnit

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe…

— Rebecca Solnit

“What doesn’t go back in the jar or the box are ideas. And revolutions are, most of all, made up of ideas.…

— Rebecca Solnit

“I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Building a museum case and filling it with types of mussels is one way of knowing mussels; but on the shore, a…

— Rebecca Solnit

“When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse…

— Rebecca Solnit

“A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his…

— Rebecca Solnit

“There isn't a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story…

— Rebecca Solnit

“That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though…

— Rebecca Solnit