Rebecca Solnit quote: "The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way."

More and more I think of privatisation as being not just about the takeover of resources and power b...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revoluti...
REBECCA SOLNIT

How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized h...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they ri...
REBECCA SOLNIT

It's not that bad things never happen. But there's a pattern in which most people are calm, ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, a...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
REBECCA SOLNIT

I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
REBECCA SOLNIT

I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal fami...
REBECCA SOLNIT

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.
REBECCA SOLNIT

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

We are entering an era of heightened disaster, thanks to climate change. Being prepared for disaster...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The world you live in is not a given; much of what is best in it has been built through the struggle...
REBECCA SOLNIT

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is...
REBECCA SOLNIT

I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Credibility is a basic survival tool.
REBECCA SOLNIT

As I started to pursue the subject more deeply I realized that walking was this wonderful meandering...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a s...
REBECCA SOLNIT

[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to t...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains,...
REBECCA SOLNIT

For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communi...
REBECCA SOLNIT

To say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost chil...
REBECCA SOLNIT

For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich i...
REBECCA SOLNIT

...the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose hab...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each oth...
REBECCA SOLNIT

We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only fa...
REBECCA SOLNIT

This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out by contrast how the rest of the time mo...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and mea...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everythin...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled b...
REBECCA SOLNIT

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walki...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.
REBECCA SOLNIT

For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] so...
REBECCA SOLNIT

They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some po...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Opposition is often illusory.
REBECCA SOLNIT

A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condit...
REBECCA SOLNIT

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The coolness of Buddhism isn't indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by ma...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Goodwill is something you put away like preserves, for a rainy day, for winter, for lean times, and ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dan...
REBECCA SOLNIT

In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missin...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianis...
REBECCA SOLNIT

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something an...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The planting of [orchards] represents a reduction of a complex ecology into the monocultural grid of...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of inters...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it's something you mostly give yourself,...
REBECCA SOLNIT

An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter fo...
REBECCA SOLNIT

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged fr...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling...
REBECCA SOLNIT

To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everyth...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the op...
REBECCA SOLNIT

There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that so...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until ever...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issu...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or t...
REBECCA SOLNIT

For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people...
REBECCA SOLNIT

I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but...
REBECCA SOLNIT

You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the cultur...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society.
REBECCA SOLNIT

Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the proble...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.
REBECCA SOLNIT

We write history with our feet and with our presece and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.
REBECCA SOLNIT

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important thing...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves be...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Just because the question can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people to...
REBECCA SOLNIT

I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by anothe...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The Earth we evolved to inhabit is turning into something more turbulent and unreliable at a pace to...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

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

A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Tu...
REBECCA SOLNIT

That (labyrinth)...became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: somet...
REBECCA SOLNIT

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the differen...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prison...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but c...
REBECCA SOLNIT

As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

If you walk a city, if you love a city, if you put in your miles and years with open heart and mind,...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

We tend to treat violence and the abuse of power as though they fit into airtight categories: harass...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Many heterosexual marriages are childless; many with children break up: they are no guarantee that c...
REBECCA SOLNIT

It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible "Being m...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedule...
REBECCA SOLNIT

After my book Wanderlust came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a book to everyone who values and benefits from e...
REBECCA SOLNIT

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
REBECCA SOLNIT

...you don't have the memory of your future; {that}the future is indeed dark, which is the best thin...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Still, even now, when a woman says something uncomfortable about male misconduct, she is routinely p...
REBECCA SOLNIT

But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel...
REBECCA SOLNIT

(Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides between 9/11 a...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

There’s no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to surviv...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking pow...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Rape culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women...
REBECCA SOLNIT

billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the business of naming.In some cult...
REBECCA SOLNIT

To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your ...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita Sarkeesia...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the r...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the da...
REBECCA SOLNIT

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.
REBECCA SOLNIT

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears w...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offer...
REBECCA SOLNIT

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of hor...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful soli...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
REBECCA SOLNIT

Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implicat...
REBECCA SOLNIT

The fear of rape puts many women in their place - indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on mater...
REBECCA SOLNIT

Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taki...
REBECCA SOLNIT

One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mo...
REBECCA SOLNIT

You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.
REBECCA SOLNIT

From age nine, my friends and I were on the streets, walking home, going to each other's houses,...
REBECCA STEAD

I love thinking of cartoon characters feeling really real feelings. And I love to do that, not just ...
REBECCA SUGAR

The potential for the abuse of power through digital networks - upon which we the people now depend ...
REBECCA MACKINNON

Flowers heal me. Tulips make me happy. I keep myself surrounded by them as soon as they start coming...
REBECCA WELLS

I love hats and winter is the perfect time for them. I love winter time fashion.
REBECCA FERGUSON

Radio was used powerfully by Josef Goebbels to disseminate Nazi propaganda, and just as powerfully b...
REBECCA MACKINNON

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intellig...
REBECCA WEST

In 220 years of American presidential politics, there had been no serious female major party contend...
REBECCA TRAISTER

You have to be really strong in the music industry, and I'm naturally very timid. That was reall...
REBECCA FERGUSON

Negative views of Pakistan expressed by prominent members of the global business community are taken...
REBECCA MACKINNON

One of the favorite conservative themes is that the cure for poverty is more marriage and earlier ma...
REBECCA TRAISTER

The erosion of privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment, written to protect us against unreasonable...
REBECCA MACKINNON

Facebook is blocked in mainland China, but is used heavily by the rest of the Chinese-speaking world...
REBECCA MACKINNON

When U.S. commercial interests press the Chinese government to do a better job of policing Chinese w...
REBECCA MACKINNON

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call m...
REBECCA WEST

I hate women because they always know where things are.
REBECCA WEST

I have the distinct feeling that when I'm old, and I look back on my life, my thirties will be o...
REBECCA MAKKAI

To me I'm just a regular person going to the mall with friends, and now I'm in Forever 21 an...
REBECCA BLACK

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and mat...
REBECCA WEST

The main difference between men and woman is that men are lunatics and woman are idiots.
REBECCA WEST

I did teach elementary school for quite a while, and so I didn't have to reach too far back for ...
REBECCA MAKKAI

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on the headstone might well be: "It seemed a g...
REBECCA WEST

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
REBECCA WEST

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
REBECCA WEST

People call me feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a pros...
REBECCA WEST

When I get a brand new bag, I wear it for months and months.
REBECCA GAYHEART

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
REBECCA WEST

Journalism - an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
REBECCA WEST

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
REBECCA WEST

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are interesting monologues, that is...
REBECCA WEST

The 'Shawshank Redemption' has nothing to do with China, but that hasn't kept social med...
REBECCA MACKINNON

The prints shop manager, a balding man of about thirty years old, dressed in a plaid work shirt and ...
REBECCA MCNUTT

Mandy would much rather have imaginary friends who were real than real friends who were imaginary.
REBECCA MCNUTT

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call m...
REBECCA WEST

She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent...
REBECCA WEST

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the p...
REBECCA WEST

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers j...
REBECCA WEST

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent di...
REBECCA WEST

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
REBECCA WEST

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vi...
REBECCA WEST

But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
REBECCA WEST

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so ...
REBECCA WEST

One of the most valuable things we can do to heal one another is listen to each other's stories.
REBECCA FALLS

Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's...
REBECCA WEST

He is every other inch a gentleman.
REBECCA WEST

Did St Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better...
REBECCA WEST

All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sle...
REBECCA WEST

Being classy is my teenage rebellion.
REBECCA MCKINSEY

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform ...
REBECCA WEST

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of ...
REBECCA WEST

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
REBECCA WEST

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call m...
REBECCA WEST

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from ...
REBECCA WEST

It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
REBECCA WEST

When I first drove my car down Sunset Strip, I nearly crashed my car gazing at the monolithic ads of...
REBECCA PIDGEON

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
REBECCA WEST

There's a lot of politics over who gets the next allocation of Congressional funding.
REBECCA MACKINNON

My goals have gone from being an all-star to just being able to play basketball. I always took for g...
REBECCA LOBO

Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe ...
REBECCA MACKINNON

I was a sort of New York intellectual when I was 16. I wanted to dress like Annie Hall when I was 18...
REBECCA HALL

I'm really inspired by the show 'Future Boy Conan' from the '70s. It's a really ...
REBECCA SUGAR

Obama has proved to be particularly adept at using the media to disseminate his administration's...
REBECCA TRAISTER

It's so rare that I get to do something in my own accent in my own hometown.
REBECCA HALL

City life is stressful. Everybody is running around like crazy, stuck in traffic jams trying to make...
REBECCA PIDGEON

As in Pakistan, Tunisian and Egyptian human rights activists are concerned that any censorship mecha...
REBECCA MACKINNON

Our government and its social policies, its tax breaks, the way school days work, so much of the cou...
REBECCA TRAISTER

The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.

Rebecca Solnit

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