Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

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. But we are free together or slaves together

Perder cosas tiene que ver con la desaparición de lo conocido, perderse tiene que ver con la aparición de lo desconocido.

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think. It's an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives; it's a celebration of darkness, willing – as that "I think" indicates—to be uncertain even about its own assertion.

The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don't know you are looking for, and you don't know a place until it surprises you. Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect ineffable.

addressing our own suffering while learning not to inflict it on others is part of the work we're all here to do.

he aprendido que cierta cantidad de dudas sobre las propias posibilidades suponen una buena herramienta para corregir, comprender, escuchar y progresar, aunque demasiadas pueden ser paralizantes y la total confianza en uno mismo produce idiotas arrogantes.

Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen.

In New York itself, hospitals prepared for a huge influx of wounded, and a triage center was set up on the Chelsea Piers, but the disaster had been so brutal and absolute that there were only the living and the dead and few in between

People disappear into their stories all the time. We live in stories and images, as immersed in them as though they were Wu Daozi's inkpots; we breathe in presuppositions and exhale further stories. We in the West have been muddled by Plato's assertion that art is imitation and illusion; we believe that it is a realm apart, one whose impact on our world is limited, one in which we do not live.

I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it. She just discovered that she herself did not exist, but her brothers did.

Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him, to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

our interrogation of Woolf's reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, "Fuck this shit," which carried the same general message, and moved everyone on from the discussion.) After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas, and we were discussing Woolf because of the latter.

We are constantly given one-size-fits-all formulas, but those formulas fail, often and hard. Nevertheless, we are given them again. And again and again. They become prisons and punishments; the prison of the imagination traps many in the prison of a life that is correctly aligned with the recipes and yet is entirely miserable.

reimposed or a new one, perhaps more oppressive or perhaps more just and free, like the disaster utopia, will arise.

Would you ask a man that?") Such questions seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51 percent of the human species who are as diverse in their wants and as mysterious in their desires as the other 49 percent, only Woman, who must marry, must breed, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator for the species.

The military and National Guard were deployed to prevent things that often existed largely in their imagination.

The veil was a kind of wall of privacy, the marker of a woman for one man, a portable architecture of confinement.

Colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.

Part of my own endeavor as a writer has been to find ways to value what is elusive and overlooked, to describe nuances and shades of meaning, to celebrate public life and solitary life, and—in John Berger's phrase—to find "another way of telling.

It's not just public, or private, or online either. It's also embedded in our political system, and our legal system, which before feminists fought for us didn't recognize most domestic violence, or sexual harassment and stalking, or date rape, or acquaintance rape, or marital rape, and in cases of rape still often tries the victim rather than the rapist, as though only perfect maidens could be assaulted—or believed

The earth is seven-tenths water, but the ratio of silence to voice is far greater. If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the stories that have not. The ghosts outnumber the books by some unimaginably vast sum.

A woman is still beaten every nine seconds in this country, but thanks to the heroic feminist campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, she now has access to legal remedies that occasionally work, occasionally protect her, and—even more occasionally—send her abuser to jail.

People would ask the question, 'How do we keep these very powerful men from being so abusive. And I was like, 'I don't think we're going to stop them from being so abusive, so let's stop them from being so powerful.

Nothing of that tongue survived into my generation but a few insults: Yiddish can describe defects of character with the precision that Inuit describes ice or Japanese rain.