Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.

All I want is for people, when they read my books, to feel companioned, to feel they're not alone in the world.

Books wind into the heart.

Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

He is not to them what he is to me," I thought: "he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine- I am sure he is- I feel akin to him- I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him.

The point of books is to combat loneliness.

He looks at me, and I don't know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she's not here with us now, in this room. It's just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

I'm pouring my guts out so they can feel like your guts at the same time.

I show them the funny part, the silly part, the laughing part, the crazy part and then the really deep, deep part where I'm talking from my heart to these people. Because I've been through everything they've been through.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

The royal road to a man's heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.

All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.

You've got a song you're singing from your gut, you want that audience to feel it in their gut. And you've got to make them think that you're one of them sitting out there with them too. They've got to be able to relate to what you're doing.

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond.

Part of the allure of watching characters on-screen is to be able to put yourself in his or her shoes or to be able to relate to what he or she is going through or what he or she is thinking.

I turn to books for a feeling of companionship: for somebody knowing what I have known.

On airplanes, strangers confide in me the most deepest, darkest secrets. And I think they think I'll understand. And I generally do understand.

When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.

There are many doors to the heart.