Best 325 quotes of Rebecca Solnit on MyQuotes

Rebecca Solnit

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    Rebecca Solnit

    A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    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.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    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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    Rebecca Solnit

    An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Anarchists believe that we can govern ourselves in the absence of coercive and centralized authority; the underlying premise about human nature (to use an infinitely problematized but necessary term here) is fundamentally positive. And the evidence that in disasters people are really pretty kind, generous, brave, resourceful and creative fed that.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    A restlessness has seized hold of many of us, a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing, or doing at least two things at once, or going to check some other medium. It's an anxiety about keeping up, about not being left out or getting behind.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    As I started to pursue the subject more deeply I realized that walking was this wonderful meandering path through everything I was already interested in - gender politics, public space and urban life, demonstrations and parades and marches. The relationship between walking and thinking and between the mind and the body.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    At a certain fork in the road of automatization, Europeans chose to have more time, and they work far less than we do and get much longer vacations. We chose to have more stuff, the stuff sold to us through those beckoning adjectives-bigger, better, faster: Jet Skis, extra cars, second homes, motor homes, towering slab TVs, if not the time to enjoy them or to enjoy less commodified pleasures.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Books are solitudes in which we meet.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    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.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Credibility is a basic survival tool.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Everyday life is a disaster, and disaster can liberate us.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Everywhere people are at work to build a better world in which we - and some of the beauty of this world - will be guaranteed to survive. Everywhere they are at war with the forces threatening us and the planet.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    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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    Rebecca Solnit

    Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story ... The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    EXPLORING the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    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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    Rebecca Solnit

    For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    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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    Rebecca Solnit

    For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us - the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small - to flourish.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. 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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    Rebecca Solnit

    Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.... hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    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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    Rebecca Solnit

    I don't think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it's loved by enough people that I'm grateful and able to keep going.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    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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    Rebecca Solnit

    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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    Rebecca Solnit

    I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    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.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.

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    Rebecca Solnit

    In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.