Rebecca Solnit Quotes - Page 5

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• We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Meaningful, Fun, Needs

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• 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

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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Journey, Hiking, Knowing

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.27, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• When you say 'mother' or 'father' you describe three different phenomena. There is the giant who made you and loomed over your early years; there is whatever more human-scale version might have been possible to perceive later and maybe even befriend; and there is the internalized version of the parent with whom you struggle- to appease, to escape, to be yourself, to understand and be understood by- and they make up a chaotic and contradictory trinity.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Mother, Being Yourself, Father

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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Rebecca Solnit

  Journey, Hiking, Landscape

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.54, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Destruction, Lost, Know How

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.24, Canongate Books

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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, Squares, Virginia

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.288, Univ of California Press

  8 Copy quote

• [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

  Hiking, Looks, Stories

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.111, Penguin

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.40, Granta Books

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.59, Canongate Books

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “Hope In The Dark”, p.94, Canongate Books

  7 Copy quote

• Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Survival, Liberty, Dignity

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays”, p.13, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.196, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• Walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Trekking, Strolling, Walking

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.109, Granta Books

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• The poor have often been subversive just because they don't always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Believe, Insecurity, Leeches

  Source: therumpus.net

  15 Copy quote

• All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Garden, Landscape Painting, Pope

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.99, Granta Books

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Mountain, Earth, Landscape

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.105, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Spring, Bravery, Bud

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness”, p.22, Trinity University Press

  5 Copy quote

• ...the questions a photographer raises may be more profound than the answers the medium permits.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Profound, Answers, May

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.136, Univ of California Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Reading, Looks, Might

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

• There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Self, Practice, People

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.54, Canongate Books

  5 Copy quote

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