# Rebecca Solnit - Quotes: 35 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit ## Books - [A Field Guide to Getting Lost](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/a-field-guide-to-getting-lost.md) — 6 quotes - [Hope In The Dark](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/hope-in-the-dark.md) — 24 quotes - [River of Shadows](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/river-of-shadows.md) — 2 quotes - [Wanderlust](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/wanderlust.md) — 3 quotes ## Recently added quotes > Most of us would say, if asked, that we live in a capitalist society, but vast amounts of how we live our everyday lives - our interactions with and commitments to family lives, friendships, avocations, membership in social, spiritual and political organizations-are in essence noncapitalist or even anticapitalist, full of things we do for free, out of love, and on principle. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/hope-in-the-dark/most-of-us-would.md) > A better world, yes; a perfect world, never. (p82) [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/hope-in-the-dark/a-better-world.md) > Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/hope-in-the-dark/violence-is-the.md) > ...as Freire points out, struggle generates hope as it goes along. Waiting until everything looks feasible is too long to wait. ("When We Lost" in 2016 edition) [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/hope-in-the-dark/as-freire-points.md) > … It's hard to say whether it was pain or the past that was being extirpated or whether they were the same thing. The doctors who treated her were unlikely to have experienced such profound instability: disappearing mothers, the vast gap between the medieval Russian-Polish Pale and glittering amnesiac Los Angeles, the three or four languages she left behind and the English she never completely acquired, the annihilation of the world she came from and of the relatives she left behind. Post-traumatic stress disorder is an alternate diagnosis a therapist once proffered for her behavior, a condition that recognized all the kinds of war she survived and a world in which nothing was too far-fetched or terrible to be possible. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/a-field-guide-to-getting-lost/its-hard-to-say.md) > The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/a-field-guide-to-getting-lost/the-word-lost.md) > Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don't depend on them. ("When We Lost" in 2016 edition) [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/hope-in-the-dark/resistance-is-first.md) > Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/hope-in-the-dark/your-opponents-would.md) > A couple of years ago, a friend wrote to urge me to focus on the lyrical end of my writing rather than activism and I wrote back, “What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic, and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated, and studied too, right now.” I could have added that they themselves become forms of resistance; the two are not necessarily separate practices. (p68) [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/hope-in-the-dark/a-couple-of-years.md) > I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good (p61) [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/hope-in-the-dark/i-wonder-sometimes.md) > You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/hope-in-the-dark/you-row-forward.md) > This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/a-field-guide-to-getting-lost/this-blue-is-the.md)