Rebecca Solnit Quotes

• Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music

• The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Art

• We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Important, Collective, Disasters

• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Adjust, Rumour

• To say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inversion of the mainstream’s ‘everything’s fine.’

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Straight, Mainstream

• To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.

  Rebecca Solnit

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  Tags in Dedicated, Hopeful

• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Closest, Walking

• The world you live in is not a given; much of what is best in it has been built through the struggles of passionate activists over the last centuries. They won us many freedoms and protected many beauties. Count those gifts among your growing heap.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Struggles, Passionate

• The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic to bleaching coral reefs.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Habitats, Heat

• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Survival, Great

• The exercise of democracy begins as exercise, as walking around, becoming familiar with the streets, comfortable with strangers, able to imagine your own body as powerful and expressive rather than a pawn.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Pawn, Strangers

• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Bravery, Revolution

• Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Insignificant, Civility

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Strangers, Solidarity

• Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another fortysomething years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I’m not holding my breath.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Explain, Though

• It’s not that bad things never happen. But there’s a pattern in which most people are calm, resourceful, altruistic, and they improvise emergency systems that work really well – whether it’s getting the babies out of a collapsed hospital or putting together a community kitchen to feed everybody for the next few months.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Improvise, Pattern

• I’m grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Silenced, Violently

• I feel often that we don’t have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Disasters, Trivial

• Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful – a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement – people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it’s part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Civilised, Domestic

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Forests, Flourish

Rebecca Solnit (38)

Birth:	11th June, 1961
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Writer

About

Solnit grew up in Novato, California. She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the GED. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17 she went to study in Paris, France. She ultimately returned to California and finished her college education at San Francisco State University when she was 20 years old.

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Today's Anniversary - 21st December

Births

• 1892 - Rebecca West
• 1815 - Thomas Couture
• 1969 - Julie Delpy
• 1918 - Kurt Waldheim
• 1922 - Paul Winchell

Deaths

• 2001 - David Swift
• 1992 - Stella Adler
• 1889 - Joseph Barber Lightfoot
• 1935 - Kurt Tucholsky
• 1958 - Lion Feuchtwanger