658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

Just because the question can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked.

Sometimes birds return to their cages when the door is open, sometimes people free to make their own choices choose to abandon that power.

The utopias built by citizens like Anna Holshouser are not yet on that map. But they should be. [active during 1906 earthquake and fire in SF CA] 18

Utopia itself is rarely more than an ideal or an ephemeral pattern on which to shape the real possibilities before us. 135

The function of the state and of its structures in such a society are limited only to that which cannot be performed by anyone else. [Quoting Valclad Havel] 146

Tobin James Mueller: 'No one is turned away, my one rule. I never say no. That's one of the reasons it became a utopia.' 206

A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.

Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. 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 genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it's described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddnly fell into the water, but what if you're swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?