Solnit Essay Quotes & Sayings

It is in the instinctual interpretation of voice and personality that we form our judgments of others. Nothing beats that. Not fingerprints, not DNA, not the pointed finger of an eyewitness. — Michael Connelly

Setbacks are just learning experiences. — Beth Brooke

Love may be harder to find in some people, but when they do love you know it must be something marvelous. — Criss Jami

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren't likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and there's no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers. — Rebecca Solnit

Some portion of Woolf's genius, it seems to me, is that having no notion, that negative capability. I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan. Woolf not only utilized but celebrated the unpredictable meander, on mind and foot. Her great essay "Street Haunting: A London Adventure,"from 1930, has the light breezy tone of many of her early essays, and yet voyages deep into the dark. — Rebecca Solnit

I will not have Botox. You know why? Because I eat! I eat the fat, I eat the vegetable, I eat everything. If you exercise and you don't eat enough, it takes its toll on the skin. — Salma Hayek

I've learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing - though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. There's a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet. — Rebecca Solnit

It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible "Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family". It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence come from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time. — Rebecca Solnit

If what charms you is nothing but abstract principles, sit down and turn them over quietly in your mind: but never dub yourself a Philosopher. — Epictetus

Fire walking is an act of faith. I don't know why it works. I don't know why people don't die doing it. I found it very exhilarating. — Chris Kilham

I'm rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was 10 years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants. — Greg Egan

Wow, this puts the sweet in Sweet Jesus. — David Levithan

We'll both walk away smiling, in harmonious equipoise. — George R R Martin

I am changing the notion that actresses can't have happy marriages — Mercy Johnson

We shall never forget that it was our submarines that held the lines against the enemy while our fleets replaced losses and repaired wounds. — Chester W. Nimitz

Stupidity has no friends, and wants none. — Horace Greeley

If I tell my bones they're a cage
maybe they'll keep this
snarling heart contained. — Elisabeth Hewer

I only have the quite childish horror of the grave and of nothingness — Victor Klemperer

One single letter cures the blank page. — Stephanie Ayers