Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Quotes about:

• To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Heart, Mean, Hopeful

  "We could be heroes: an election-year letter" by Rebecca Solnit, www.theguardian.com. October 15, 2012.

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• Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Kindness, Generosity, Style

  "We could be heroes: an election-year letter" by Rebecca Solnit, www.theguardian.com. October 15, 2012.

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• What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Art, Mean, Sea

  "The Faraway Nearby". Book by Rebecca Solnit, www.npr.org. June 6, 2013.

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• Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

  Rebecca Solnit

  War, Commitment, Doors

  "Hope In The Dark". Book by Rebecca Solnit, 2010.

  65 Copy quote

• 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 fine initial act of insurrection.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Joy, Faces, Fine

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “Hope In The Dark”, p.49, Canongate Books

  40 Copy quote

• Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Dark, Doors, Important

  Rebecca Solnit (2006). “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, p.7, Penguin

  68 Copy quote

• The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Stars, Reading, Sky

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.165, Univ of California Press

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• The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. The creates an odd consonance between
  internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was
  there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Journey, Hiking

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.11, Penguin

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• Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Worry, Ugly, Way

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.175, Canongate Books

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• Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Memories, Perception, Together

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• The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Stars, Home, Sleep

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.167, Univ of California Press

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• Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Pain, Care, Purpose

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.65, Granta Books

  17 Copy quote

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

  Rebecca Solnit

  Children, People, Community

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• For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Distance, Mountain Ranges, Blue

  52 Copy quote

• 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 walk, you're some place that's already interesting. You're not just between places. Things are happening.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Airplane, Two, Interesting

  "Thinking on Her Feet / Author Rebecca Solnit wrote a book about walking -- while on the move" by Sam Whiting, www.sfgate.com. May 02, 2000.

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

  Rebecca Solnit

  Writing

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.42, Granta Books

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• Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story ... The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Women, Struggle, Writing

  "Men Explain Things to Me". Book by Rebecca Solnit, www.theguardian.com. May 20, 2014.

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• I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, World, Safe

  Interview with Benjamin Cohen, www.believermag.com. September 2009.

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• A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Book, Heart, Beats

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.42, Granta Books

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• To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Commitment, Giving, Annihilation

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “Hope In The Dark”, p.29, Canongate Books

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• The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Decay, Transformation, Process

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.93, Canongate Books

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• Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Nature, Journey, Ecosystems

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.190, Penguin

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• It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, ‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’­—the boundary of the unknown.’ But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Jobs, Dark, Artist

  Rebecca Solnit (2006). “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, p.8, Penguin

  26 Copy quote

• Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Journey, Hiking, Body

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.28, Penguin

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• Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook... But we don't need everyone on board; we don't need one magic person in office; we need ourselves. To act. It's the wind, not the weathervanes.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Wind, Office, Magic

  "One magical politician won't stop climate change. It's up to all of us" by Rebecca Solnit, www.theguardian.com. May 15, 2015.

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