658 Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

But ignorance is one form of tolerance, whether it’s pretending we live in a colorblind society or one in which misogyny is some quaint old thing we’ve gotten over.

It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.

I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods.

We have far more than eighty-seven thousand rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated incident.

Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the are is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.

When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters.

A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity – culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.

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.