Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote expresses gratitude for finding one's voice after experiencing oppression and emphasizes the importance of advocating for those without a voice.
Rebecca Solnit reflects on her journey from being silenced in her early life to ultimately giving her voice to advocate for the rights of others who cannot speak for themselves. The quote highlights the strength that comes from overcoming adversity and the responsibility that accompanies having a voice, suggesting that those who have been empowered have a duty to stand up for those who are still oppressed.
Themes
VoiceAdvocacyGratitudeOppressionRights
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about social justice, I would say, 'As Solnit wisely noted, I'm grateful that I have a voice to advocate for the voiceless.'
More from Rebecca Solnit
All quotes →I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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 SolnitRead
If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
Rebecca SolnitRead
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Similar quotes
It taught him how to listen -- how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting soul, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.
Hermann HesseRead
You've got to be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for?
Bernadette PetersRead
The more we bestow the richer we become.
Thomas PaineRead
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause a while from learning to be wise. There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,- Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.
Samuel JohnsonRead
I am more afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are led by Him. I am fearful they settle down in a state of blind self-security... Let every man and woman know, by the whispering of the Spirit of God to themselves, whether their leaders are walking in the path the Lord dictates, or not.
Brigham YoungRead
Providence is wiser than you, and you may be confident it has suited all things better to your eternal good than you could do had you been left to your own option.
John FlavelRead