Rebecca Solnit quotes - page 2

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. (Rebecca Solnit)
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. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
Credibility is a basic survival tool. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they risk themselves for others. We improvise the conditions of survival beautifully. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
As I started to pursue the subject more deeply I realized that walking was this wonderful meandering path through everything I was already interested in - gender politics, public space and urban life, demonstrations and parades and marches. The relationship between walking and thinking and between the mind and the body. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
More and more I think of privatisation as being not just about the takeover of resources and power by corporate interests, but as the retreat of citizens to private life and private space, screened from solidarity with strangers and increasingly afraid or even unable to imagine acting in public. (Rebecca Solnit)
Everywhere people are at work to build a better world in which we - and some of the beauty of this world - will be guaranteed to survive. Everywhere they are at war with the forces threatening us and the planet. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
We are entering an era of heightened disaster, thanks to climate change. Being prepared for disaster will mean being prepared to sift truth from rumour, and being prepared to adjust our worldview. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
I walk wherever my errands take me. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communications and corporate backroom deals. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us - the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small - to flourish. (Rebecca Solnit)
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. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
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. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
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. View quote
Rebecca Solnit
You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found. View quote
Rebecca Solnit