Rebecca Solnit Quotes - Page 4

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

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't.

There's enough food in this world. There's enough housing in this world. There's enough shelter in this world. There's enough clothing in this world. There's enough teachers, there's enough universities for everybody's needs to be met, and the reasons they aren't is not because of lack of resources. It's because of distribution, and that's the politics of hate, which is why this is a movement against that. It's a politics of love.

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.

You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.

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.

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.

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

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.

Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.

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.

Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.

Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.