Rebecca Solnit Quotes
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Despair is easy, or at least low cost.
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No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.
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EXPLORING the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
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The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. The creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making.
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A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens - to be informed and engaged.
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Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.
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If you look at a lot of traditional societies, they're all organized along what we might call anarchist guidelines, but it's not like the Zapatistas were reading European social theory.
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A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.
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For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you're some place that's already interesting. You're not just between places. Things are happening.
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Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.
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To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
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The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.
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Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production - oriented society and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
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I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
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I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.
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We are entering an era of heightened disaster, thanks to climate change. Being prepared for disaster will mean being prepared to sift truth from rumour, and being prepared to adjust our worldview.
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Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.
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The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.
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The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.
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The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
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Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
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The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.
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It's all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.
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The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation Never to get lost is not to live.
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How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
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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.
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