Rebecca Solnit

Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart.…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events…

— Rebecca Solnit

“This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control…

— Rebecca Solnit

“A woman is still beaten every nine seconds in this country, but thanks to the heroic feminist campaigns of the 1970s and…

— Rebecca Solnit

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

“A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a…

— Rebecca Solnit

“We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often,…

— Rebecca Solnit

I STILL THINK THE REVOLUTION IS TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR POETRY, MEANDERING, FOR THE FRAIL AND VULNERABLE, THE RARE AND…

— Rebecca Solnit

“A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each…

— Rebecca Solnit

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its seed or potential, like a music score. It exists…

— Rebecca Solnit

Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.

— Rebecca Solnit

The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in…

— Rebecca Solnit

“This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you…

— Rebecca Solnit

“How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they've always believed. How the transformation happened is…

— Rebecca Solnit

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience,…

— Rebecca Solnit

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

— Rebecca Solnit

“I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Murder is the extreme version of that authoritarianism, where the murderer asserts he has the right to decide whether you live or…

— Rebecca Solnit

There is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that…

— Rebecca Solnit

“...to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and…

— Rebecca Solnit

“This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting…

— Rebecca Solnit

“Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, “were always lost, because they’d never been to these places…

— Rebecca Solnit

“...the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“It’s a system of control. It’s why so many intimate-partner murders are of women who dared to break up with those partners.”

— Rebecca Solnit