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Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit Quotes

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Famous Rebecca Solnit Quotes

“The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don't add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the fain suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup.”

SeaOceanPacific Ocean
Book:Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
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“The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don't add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the faint suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup.”

SeaOceanPacific Ocean
Book:Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
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“Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.”

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Book:The Faraway Nearby
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“Pero las verdaderas dificultades, el verdadero arte de la supervivencia, parecen residir en terrenos más sutiles. Lo que se necesita en esos terrenos es una especie de resiliencia psicológica, estar preparado para hacer frente a lo que venga. Estos cautivos ponen de manifiesto de manera cruda y dramática algo que sucede en las vidas de todo el mundo: las transiciones a través de las cuales uno deja de ser quien era.”

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Book:A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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“Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. [--] [T]ime spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space—for wilderness and for public space—must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.”

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Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
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“Sometimes these white guys with outsized platforms say shit like James Comey did when he complained that his erstwhile classmate Amy Klobuchar was 'annoyingly smart,' perhaps because women are not supposed to be like that, in his worldview. Another man had the temerity to explain to me that, 'the really smart wonks don't end up being the media stars needed to win the presidency, i.e., Hillary Clinton--super smart, knows the facts, but comes off as smug and all-knowing. I get this from Kamala Harris too.' In other words, he assumes that they are women who know too much and the character defect is theirs, not his. The framework that intelligence is an asset in a man and a defect in a woman is nastily familiar.”

MisogynyFemale Intelligence
Book:Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters
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“Young women are urged to 'never stop picturing their murder'. From childhood onward, we're instructed not to do things. Not go here. Not work there. Not go out at this hour or talk to those people, or wear this dress, or drink this drink, or partake of adventure, independent solitude. Refraining was the only form of safety offered from the slaughter.”

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Book:Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir
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“Of course false-rape allegations have happened. My friend Astra Taylor points out that the most dramatic examples in this country were when white men falsely accused Black men of assaulting white women. Which means that if you want to be indignant on the subject, you’ll need to summon up a more complicated picture of how power, blame, and mendacity actually work. (“Feminism: The Men Arrive”)”

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Book:The Mother of All Questions
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“„Kultura‍ gwałtu oznacza, że mamy do czynienia z otoczeniem, w którym gwałt jest zjawiskiem powszechnym, a media i kultura popularna normalizują i usprawiedliwiają przemoc seksualną wobec kobiet. Podtrzymuje kulturę gwałtu używanie mizoginicznego języka, uprzedmiotawianie ciał kobiet, estetyzowanie przemocy seksualnej i co za tym idzie, tworzenie społeczeństwa, które nie szanuje prawa i bezpieczeństwa kobiet. Większość kobiet i dziewcząt narzuca sobie najróżniejsze ograniczenia dlatego, że gwałty stanowią realne zagrożenie. Większość kobiet i dziewcząt żyje w strachu przed gwałtem. Mężczyźni na ogół nie. W taki sposób gwałt służy jako potężne narzędzie, za pomocą którego cała populacja kobiet pozostaje podporządkowana całej populacji mężczyzn, nawet jeśli nie wszyscy mężczyźni gwałcą i nie wszystkie kobiety padają ofiarą gwałtu”.”

FeminizmKultura Gwałtu
Book:Men Explain Things to Me
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“Laurie‍ Penny, jedna z ważnych współczesnych feministycznych myślicielek, pisze: „Kiedy‍ rozeszła się wieść o morderstwie, kiedy cały cyfrowy świat zaczął je omawiać i zastanawiać się nad jego znaczeniem, byłam bliska napisania do mojego wydawcy mejla z prośbą o kilka dni wolnego, ponieważ kilka szczególnie brutalnych pogróżek, zwłaszcza tych dotyczących gwałtu, sprawiło, że byłam roztrzęsiona i potrzebowałam czasu, żeby się pozbierać. Jednak zamiast dać sobie ten czas, piszę niniejszy post – piszę go, pogrążona w żałobie i pełna gniewu nie tylko z powodu masakry w Isla Vista, ale także z powodu tego, co tracimy wszędzie, dlatego że język i ideologia nowej mizoginii wciąż traktowane są jako coś, co można wybaczyć. (…) Mdli mnie, kiedy za każdym razem, kiedy próbuję mówić o ofiarach i o tych, które przetrwały przemoc, każe mi się współczuć sprawcom”.”

FeminizmKultura Gwałtu
Book:Men Explain Things to Me
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“But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles - not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don't know. And this is grounds to act.”

TranscendentiaBonumPotentiaActus
Book:Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
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“A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature...”

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Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“These are among the many foundation stones of this new world we have built, and the work continues. I know all this seemed impossible a decade ago, when it felt as if everything was falling apart and our climate might be doomed. But everything we did mattered. All of it. We now know that we're going to keep global temperature rise below the most dangerous tipping points that climate scientists warned us about a decade ago. We can look our kids in the eye and tell them we didn't let them down. Now we can watch their dreams unfold." — Mary Anne Hitt, "A Love Letter from the Clean Energy Future”

HopeDreamsClimate ChangeRenewable EnergyLove LetterClean EnergyRenewable Energy SourcesClimate Hope
Book:Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
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“Environmentalists like to say that defeats are permanent, victories temporary. Extinction, like death, is forever, but protection needs to be maintained. But now, in a world where restoration ecology is becoming increasingly important, it turns out that even defeats aren't always permanent. Across the United States and Europe, dams have been removed, wetlands and rivers restored, once-vanished native species reintroduced, endangered species regenerated.”

EnvironmentSpeciesActivismNativeEcologyRestorationEnvironmentalismEndangered
Book:Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
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“I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.”

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Book:Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
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“We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.”

InspirationalPoliticsHistoryActivism
Book:Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
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“Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”

HopePoliticsActivism
Book:Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
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“We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day.”

HopePoliticsActivism
Book:Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
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“Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity--seeing the troubles in this world--and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”

HopePoliticsImaginationActivism
Book:Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
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“Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves being hopeful and motivated and keeping eyes on the prize ahead. Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don’t need to or can’t go down it. You can. We have.”

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Book:Men Explain Things to Me
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“Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.”

InspirationalPoliticsChangeActivism
Book:Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
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