Rebecca Solnit Quotes
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.
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.
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.
Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.
Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be "apolitical" is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.
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.
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.
Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.
Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
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.
A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.
Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.
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.
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.
To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?
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.
The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
EXPLORING the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
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.
I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?
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.
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
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.
It's all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.
The Earth we evolved to inhabit is turning into something more turbulent and unreliable at a pace too fast for most living things to adapt to.
A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.
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.
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.
Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
