Rebecca Solnit famous quotes

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

#Book #Heart #Beats

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Dark #Doors #Important

To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Heart #Mean #Hopeful

Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Water #Diversity #Design

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Stars #Sleep #Home

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Beautiful #Spring #Earthquakes

To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#World #Arms #Mystery

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#War #Commitment #Doors

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Writing

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

#Dark #Journey #Plunge

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Distance #Blue #Color

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Opposites #Water #Gold

The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Self #Space #Despair

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Sleep #Cities #Shoes

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Thinking #Echoes #Mind

Despair is easy, or at least low cost.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Despair #Cost #Easy

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Thinking #Doing Nothing #Done

[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Looks #Stories #Narrative

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Feet #Space #People

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Cities #Way #Limits

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, ‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’­—the boundary of the unknown.’ But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Jobs #Dark #Artist

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Lying #Book #Writing

Think of civil society and the state as joined in a marriage of necessity. You already know who the wife is, the one who is supposed to love, cherish and obey: that's civil society. Think of the state as the domineering husband who expects to have a monopoly on power, on violence, on planning and policymaking.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Husband #Thinking #Wife

Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Brother #Environmental #Looks

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Believe #Worry #People

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Sky #Space #Desert

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?
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Plato #Inspiration #Thinking

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Writing #Imagination #Might

Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Nature #Journey #Ecosystems

Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Gone #Records

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Kindness #Generosity #Style

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Stars #Reading #Sky

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 Solnit

#Cities #Imagination #Quality

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its seed or potential, like a music score. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the seed germinates and the symphony resounds. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Real #Book #Heart

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

#Ineffable #Protect #Walkers

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Crush #Exercise #Men

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Adventure #Self #Imagination

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 Solnit

#Thinking #Safe #Revolution

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space — for wilderness and public space — must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Fighting #Space #Imagination

Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Pain #Care #Purpose

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Ice #Sea #Stories

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

#Journey #Hiking #Landscape

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Book #Intimate #Reader

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Thinking #Virginia #Squares

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Car #Missing #World

Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Writing #Elements #Narrative

For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Pride #Journey #Thinking

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.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Real #Garden #Space

Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.
-- Rebecca Solnit

#Journey #Hiking #Body