“In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.” — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“the language of free speech is used to protect hate speech, itself an attempt to deprive others of their freedom of speech,… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.” — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course,… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless. — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe,… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.” — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.” — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“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… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put ourself in their story, or figure out how… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place without truly… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.” — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm, maybe… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two places. But to… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image