Rebecca Solnit

“All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves being hopeful and motivated and keeping eyes on…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the…

— Rebecca Solnit

“The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time…

— Rebecca Solnit

“There are good and great books on the Esquire list, though even Moby-Dick, which I love, reminds me that a book without…

— Rebecca Solnit

“...William Stegner...coined the term 'the geography of hope,' countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could…

— Rebecca Solnit

Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field;…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at…

— Rebecca Solnit

“...perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far.”

— 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

Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.

— Rebecca Solnit

“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist…

— Rebecca Solnit

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no…

— Rebecca Solnit

“...the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your…

— Rebecca Solnit

“[Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His…

— Rebecca Solnit

“The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual…

— Rebecca Solnit

“In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they’re more likely to…

— Rebecca Solnit

If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an…

— Rebecca Solnit

“A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and…

— Rebecca Solnit

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should…

— Rebecca Solnit

How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?

— Rebecca Solnit

“Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he…

— Rebecca Solnit

“The truth is that we're drowning in busywork, nonproductive work, everything from "creative" banking and insurance bureaucracies to the pointless shuffling of…

— Rebecca Solnit

“To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the…

— Rebecca Solnit

I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the…

— Rebecca Solnit