658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.

The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.

There’s more that we need to be liberated from: maybe a system that prizes competition and ruthlessness and short-term thinking and rugged individualism, a system that serves environmental destruction and limitless consumption so well – that arrangement you can call capitalism. It embodies the worst of machismo while it destroys what’s best on Earth. More men fit into it better, but it doesn’t really serve any of us.

Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for the United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.

Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.

It’s all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.

Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience.