Recollections of My Nonexistence Quotes

“What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you?”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“You could be erased a little so that there was less of you, less confidence, less freedom, or your rights could be eroded, your body invaded so that it was less and less yours, you could be rubbed out altogether, and none of those possibilities seemed particularly remote. All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive, to hover between two zones of punishment in space that was itself so thin that perhaps it never existed, trying to find some impossible balance of being desirable to those we desired and being safe from those we did not.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“We die all the time to avoid being killed.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“Though patriarchy often claims a monopoly on rationality and reason, those committed to it will discount the most verifiable, coherent, ordinary story told by a woman and accept any fantastical account by a man, will pretend sexual violence is rare and false accusations common, and so forth.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“I read, I daydreamed, I wandered the city so ardently in part because it was a means of wandering in my thoughts, and my thoughts were runaways, constantly taking me away in the midst of the conversation, the meal, the class, the work, the play, the dance, the party. They were a place I wanted to be, thinking, musing, analyzing, imagining, hoping, tracing connections, integrating new ideas, but they grabbed me and ran with me from the situations at hand over and over. I disappeared in the middle of conversations, sometimes because I was bored but just as often because someone said something so interesting that my mind chased after the idea they offered and lost track of the rest of what they said. I lived in a long reverie for years, went days without much interruption to it, which was one of the gifts of solitude.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once. “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“I always wanted something more, something else, and if I got it I wanted the next thing, and there was always something to want. Craving gnawed at me. I wanted things so badly, with a desire that was so sharp it gouged me, and the process of wanting often took up far more time and imaginative space than the actual person, place, or thing, or the imaginary thing possessed more power than the real one.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“Men’s bodies are weapons and women’s bodies are targets and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together - or tearing some piece of it apart to find what's hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions - and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin. The process can be incandescent with excitement, whether from finding some unexpected scrap of information or from recognizing the patterns that begin to arise as the fragments begin to assemble. Something you didn't know well comes into focus, and the world makes sense in a new way, or an old assumption is gutted, and then you try to write it down.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“The science on the subject is pretty clear: according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat. Think about that for a moment—being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“How do you make art when the art that's all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes?”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“It was they who taught me that a conversation even between strangers could be a gift and sport of sorts, a chance for warmth, banter, blessings, humor, that spoken words could be fire at which you warmed yourself.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“The word adult implies that all the people who’ve attained legal majority make up a coherent category, but we are travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“There is something astonishing about reading, about that suspension of your own time and place to travel into others’. It’s a way of disappearing from where you are—not quite entering the author’s mind but engaging with it so that something arises between your mind and hers. You translate words into your own images, faces, places, light and shade and sound and emotion. A world arises in your head that you have built at the author’s behest, and when you’re present in that world you’re absent from your own.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“James Baldwin famously wrote, “If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it's described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddnly fell into the water, but what if you're swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“Davis calls PTSD living at the whim of your worst memories.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“Think about that for a moment—being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“We were subject to the wonders and frustrations of unpredictability and better able to withstand them because time moved at what would only later seem a gentle flow, like a river across a prairie before the waterfall of acceleration we would all tumble over. We were prepared for encounters with strangers in ways that the digital age would buffer a lot of us from later. It was an era of both more unpredictable contact and more profound solitude.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“graduated as I turned twenty, and then realized that the world and I were not ready for each other.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

“James Baldwin famously wrote, 'If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.' Redefining women and their roles redefined men and masculinity and vice versa. If the genders were not opposite but a spectrum of variations on some central theme of being human, if there were many ways to execute your role or refuse it, and liberation for each gender was seen as being allowed to take up what had been considered the proper role and goods and even feelings of the other or find some third (or seventh) way, then the citadel would be broken and everyone could travel freely.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world is broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir