Rebecca Solnit Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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 Solnit

  Real, Book, Home

  "The Faraway Nearby". Book by Rebecca Solnit, June 2013.

  18 Copy quote

• Books are solitudes in which we meet.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Book, Solitude

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.36, Granta Books

  5 Copy quote

• People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Children, People, Community

  6 Copy quote

• Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.

  Rebecca Solnit

  World, Body, Busy

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.11, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• 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, Done, Doing Nothing

  "Thinking on Her Feet / Author Rebecca Solnit wrote a book about walking -- while on the move". Interview with Sam Whiting, www.sfgate.com. May 2, 2000.

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Rebecca Solnit (2006). “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, p.8, Penguin

  27 Copy quote

• Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Journey, Hiking, Body

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.28, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Nature, Animal, Imagination

  Rebecca Solnit (2006). “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, p.97, Penguin

  17 Copy quote

• There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Different, Fossils, Himalayas

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.67, Canongate Books

  17 Copy quote

• The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Decay, Transformation, Process

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.93, Canongate Books

  13 Copy quote

• Roads are a record of those who have gone before.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Gone, Records

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.57, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Past, Forever, Events

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.156, Granta Books

  25 Copy quote

• It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Memories, Exploring The World, Giving

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.16, Penguin

  28 Copy quote

• Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Memories, Butterfly, Mean

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.10, Granta Books

  35 Copy quote

• 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

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.124, Univ of California Press

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.9, Univ of California Press

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.136, Penguin

  21 Copy quote

• Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Adventure, Reason, Turns

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.25, Granta Books

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Want, Sides

  " Losing the plot, not the place" by Josh Lacey, www.theguardian.com. May 5, 2006.

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.22, Granta Books

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• Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Fall, Two, Getting Lost

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.32, Canongate Books

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• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Art, Balance, World

  20 Copy quote

• 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

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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?

  Rebecca Solnit

  Plato, Inspiration, Thinking

  28 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Passionate Desire, Identity

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.26, Canongate Books

  24 Copy quote

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