658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

I think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.

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.

You don't have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don't have to drop the pleasures of style

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

I don't think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it's loved by enough people that I'm grateful and able to keep going.

What is kind of beautiful about Katrina is that even though the media and officials are working hard at telling us everyone in New Orleans was a monster, in the immediate aftermath more than 200,000 people invite displaced strangers into their homes through hurricanehousing.org and an uncounted horde go to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to give, to love, to be in solidarity, and to rebuild.

I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.