Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

The treadmill is a corollary to the suburb and the autotropolis: a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is nowhere to go.

In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness —from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.

Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointment, betrayal, and there have been major disappointments in recent years.

Sometimes birds return to their cages when the door is open, sometimes people free to make their own choices choose to abandon that power.

Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even.

On ordinary days we each walk alone or with a companion or two on the sidewalks, and the streets are used for transit and for commerce. On extraordinary days—on the holidays that are anniversaries of historic and religious events and on the days we make history ourselves—we walk together, and the whole street is for stamping out the meaning of the day.

The conversation changed. The term "rape culture" started to circulate widely. It insists that a wider culture generates individual crimes and that both must be addressed—and can be.

J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, "live always at the 'edge of mystery'—the boundary of the unknown.

We'd never set eyes on each other before. But that's the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers.

It was as though she traveled by a map of the wrong place, hitting walls, driving into ditches, missing her destination, but never stopping or throwing out the map. And she never stopped being Cinderella, and told her own story largely as a series of things that happened to her rather than things she did.

Where does a story begin? The fiction is that they do, and end, rather than that the stuff of a story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea and poured back into it

because though a rape is reported only every 6.2 minutes in this country, the estimated total is perhaps five times as high.

To tell a story and have it and the teller recognized and respected is still one of the best methods we have of overcoming trauma.

when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they're more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent.

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf—that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be.

However beautiful the stars of a suddenly visible night sky, few nowadays could find their way by them.

R]apists tend to lie, a lot...

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them.

As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed.  The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally.

The traditional versions of history, the conventional sources of news encourage us to fix our gaze on that stage.

It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I'm interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.

Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïvete," the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked.

Once a utopia in the eyes of many, San Francisco became the nerve center of a new dystopia.

Woolf liberates the text, the imagination, the fictional character, and then demands that liberty for ourselves, most particularly for women.