Rebecca Solnit Quotes

And Rebekah said to Isaac, “I am weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth; if Jacob takes a wife of the daughters of Heth, like these who are the daughters of the land, what good will my life be to me?”

L.A. Kauffman: I am curious to hear what things are making you most hopeful right now, what things in the landscape you are really fixing on as signs of hope.
Rebecca Solnit: Two things that always come up for me: one is that half the people under 18 in this country are not white. And you see how awesome, like, the Parkland students are, and that this rising generation kind of gets the connections between economics and race and gender. They are not nearly as homophobic as anyone who ever came before them, and a lot of them actually think very fluidly about their own gender and who they are attracted to. So, and that is coupled with the fact—and this is something I have written about, because it does not feel widely enough understood—the Republicans could not have won any of the last many national elections except through massive voter suppression.

I think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine.

The books I write often feel like the books I wanted to read, but they didn't exist, so I brought them into being.

I also read poetry—from Pablo Neruda to Warsan Shire—fairly regularly, and it keeps my sense of what words can do wide open and my sense of beauty awake.

(What moves you most in a work of literature?) To recognize a pattern and a meaning and an order in the world you didn't quite see before is exhilarating, and sometimes even exalting, and there is a moral beauty in the actions people perform out of generosity and courage that stirs and fortifies me—it's why I read and write about political activism and public life.

(Which writers—novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets—working today do you admire most?) Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay, Ocean Vuong, Louise Erdrich, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Elena Ferrante, Ariel Dorfman, Bill McKibben, Jamaica Kincaid, Maria Popova, Annie Dillard, Arundhati Roy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alicia Garza, Fanny Howe, Nick Flynn, Lidia Yuknavitch, Greg Sarris, Elizabeth Kolbert, Jane Mayer, Jelani Cobb, Ronan Farrow, Valeria Luiselli, Eyal Press, Gustavo Esteva, Robert Hass, Mike Davis, Rob Macfarlane, Richard Holmes, Masha Gessen, Zeynep Tufekci, Rebecca Traister, Dahlia Lithwick, Soraya Chemaly, David Corn, Garance Burke, A. C. Thompson.

Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.

This is why I pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation.

Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and living species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by its true name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

what is sometimes regarded as an inconsistency in the contemporary right-wing platform—the desire to regulate women’s reproductive activity in particular, and sexuality in general, while deregulating everything else—is only inconsistent if you regard women as people. If you regard women as an undifferentiated part of nature, their bodies are just another place a man has every right to go.

Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone. (p153)

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. (p94)

The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas. (p91)

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt. (p71)