658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.

Or maybe there’s one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essence of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness.

Of course women’s walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.

Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.

The word adult implies that all the people who’ve attained legal majority make up a coherent category, but we are travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go.

All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence.

I wish that I could put up yesterday’s evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony, ten thousand glorious days of clouds that will instead vanish and never be seen again, line them up in jars where they might be admired in the interim and tasted again as needed.

A lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with “yes but”. Naysaying becomes a habit.