658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

When something assembles itself that fast, it’s clear it’s been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time.

Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won’t mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

Feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a plan to liberate us all.

The poor have often been subversive just because they don’t always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work.

The current President’s verbal abuse of language itself – with his slurred, sloshing semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday, no matter what else he’s serving, he’s always serving meaninglessness.

Time always wins; our victories are only delays; but delays are sweet, and a delay can last a whole lifetime.

The term ‘politics of prefiguration’ has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it’s a temporary and local place...

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.

Much fuss has been made over the idea of the frontier, as though it were a line advancing east to west, but the West was settled piece meal, and Indians fled in many directions to escape the tightening noose of the railroad lines and towns.