Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Rebecca Solnit is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where bi-monthly she writes the magazine's "Easy Chair" essay.

✵ 24. June 1961  •  Other names ربکا سولیت

Rebecca Solnit photo

Charles Kremenak, Cropped from Flickr original Rebecca Solnit and Mr. Bruno / CC BY 2.5

Works

Men Explain Things To Me

Men Explain Things To Me

Rebecca Solnit

The Faraway Nearby

The Faraway Nearby

Rebecca Solnit

Men Explain Things To Me

Men Explain Things To Me

Rebecca Solnit

The Faraway Nearby

The Faraway Nearby

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit: 45 quotes4 likes

Famous Rebecca Solnit Quotes

“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.”

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.”

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Walking… is how the body measures itself against the earth.”

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

“We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.”

Rebecca Solnit book Men Explain Things To Me

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

“A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.”

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Rebecca Solnit Quotes about the world

“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey… but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.”

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“When I think of the artist Yves Klein, I think of those absolutists who preceded him by a generation or two, those who vanished, think of the boxer and Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan who in 1918 was supposed to leave Mexico to meet his new wife in Argentina but was never seen again; of Everett Ruess, the bohemian who might have become an artist or writer had he not disappeared into the canyons of Utah at the age of twenty in 1934, leaving behind a final signature carved into the rock: “Nemo” or “no one”; of the aviator Amelia Earhart who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937; of the pilot Antoine de Saint Exupéry who left behind several lapidary books before his plane too disappeared, in 1944, in the Mediterranean. They were all saddled with a desire to appear in the world and a desire to go as far as possible that was a will to disappear from it. In the ambition was a desire to make over the world as it should be; but in the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility.”

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

“… It’s hard to say whether it was pain or the past that was being extirpated or whether they were the same thing. The doctors who treated her were unlikely to have experienced such profound instability: disappearing mothers, the vast gap between the medieval Russian-Polish Pale and glittering amnesiac Los Angeles, the three or four languages she left behind and the English she never completely acquired, the annihilation of the world she came from and of the relatives she left behind. Post-traumatic stress disorder is an alternate diagnosis a therapist once proffered for her behavior, a condition that recognized all the kinds of war she survived and a world in which nothing was too far-fetched or terrible to be possible.”

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

“The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.”

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

“This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.”

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

“Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.”

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)

Rebecca Solnit Quotes about the trip

“Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.”

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

“Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.”

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.”

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.”

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train.”

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)

Rebecca Solnit Quotes

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.”

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)
Source: Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
Context: Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.

“Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.”

Rebecca Solnit book Men Explain Things To Me

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

“The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.”

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.”

Source: Hope in the Dark

“… to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender…”

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels”

Source: Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

“Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

“Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.”

Rebecca Solnit book Men Explain Things To Me

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

“Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness.”

Rebecca Solnit book Men Explain Things To Me

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

“Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.”

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

“Roads are a record of those who have gone before.”

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

“But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.”

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.”

Rebecca Solnit book Men Explain Things To Me

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

“Books are solitudes in which we meet.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

“Home is everything you can walk to.”

Source: Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

“Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful.”

Rebecca Solnit book Men Explain Things To Me

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

“There’s no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.”

Rebecca Solnit book Men Explain Things To Me

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

“You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found…”

“The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.”

Rebecca Solnit book Men Explain Things To Me

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

“Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.”

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Sometimes, cause and effect are centuries apart”

“… We talked while the full moon mounted in the sky, words filling up the narrow space between us, as much a buffer as a link. Hours passed and then suddenly at my foot there was a wriggle of the soil. A kangaroo mouse emerged, a creature that I have never otherwise seen except fleeing at a distance. I put my hand on the man’s shoulder to call his attention to this surprise, and we fell silent and watched the strangely fearless mouse do its work for a long time, then resumed the conversation more slowly and more softly as the creature continued to refine its tunnel entrance and the mound of gravelly earth at its mouth, indifferent to our presence. Bats swooped down and snatched invisible meals from the air, and coyotes began to howl, more of them, closer and more persistently than I’ve ever heard before or since, a whole orchestra of drawn-out cries into the dawn.”

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

“This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route.”

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)

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