Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnitis an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where bi-monthly she writes the magazine's "Easy Chair" essay...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth11 June 1961
CountryUnited States of America
kindness empathy gender
Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.
wall distance rocks
Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.
memories decision tangible
Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.
heart want disagree
A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.
writing technology years
I've been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.
growing-up book native-american
Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
understanding territory ends
I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.
latin america political
I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
earthquakes cities interesting
For me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive - Mexico City's big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change.
meaningful fun needs
We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.
natural disaster
There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
stories landscape decided
For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.
grateful thinking people
I don't think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it's loved by enough people that I'm grateful and able to keep going.
what-matters style pleasure
You don't have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don't have to drop the pleasures of style