658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.

If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.

About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country.

I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.

To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.

Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.

For me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive – Mexico City’s big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change.

We live inside each other’s thoughts and works.

Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It’s so common to live in a place without truly knowing its history, its systems, and the people who are different from you and who move through different versions of the city.