Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

About Rebecca Solnit:

Rebecca Solnit is a writer who lives in San Francisco, California. She has written on a variety of subjects, including the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where bi-monthly she writes the magazine's "Easy Chair" essay.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you do...

Rebecca Solnit

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that myt...

Rebecca Solnit

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the old Norse ‘los’ meaning the disbanding of an army…I worry now that people ...

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 yourself came from, and where you will go.

Rebecca Solnit

Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our cap...

Rebecca Solnit

The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.

Rebecca Solnit

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

Rebecca Solnit

[B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.

Rebecca Solnit

Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.

Rebecca Solnit

The coolness of Buddhism isn't indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as whole, see all the islands and the routes be...

Rebecca Solnit

When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things fo...

Rebecca Solnit

Some people love their story that much even if it's of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don't know how to stop telling it. Maybe it's about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear—you have t...

Rebecca Solnit

Credibility is a basic survival tool.

Rebecca Solnit

Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.

Rebecca Solnit

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

To say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inversion of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.'

Rebecca Solnit

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

Rebecca Solnit

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

The exercise of democracy begins as exercise, as walking around, becoming familiar with the streets, comfortable with strangers, able to imagine your own body as powerful and expressive rather than a pawn.

Rebecca Solnit

Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live.

Rebecca Solnit

Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communications and corporate backroom deals.

Rebecca Solnit

Author Bio

  • NameRebecca Solnit
  • DescriptionAuthor and essayist from United States
  • BornJune 11, 1961
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionArt Historian; Journalist; Author
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship