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Rebecca Solnit

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Famous Rebecca Solnit Quotes

“The fight for free space-for wilderness and for public space-must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.”

FightingIndividualImaginationSpaceWalksJourneyCrimeWalkingCrisisStoresWanderChainsConsumersWildernessAppetiteHikingOutletsTrekkingStrollingSaunteringAdvocacyFree Time
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.”

WayMadeEndsMemoriesDecisionCrimeReturnSceneLandscapeImmortalTangibleBack In TimeGo Back In Time
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.”

PeopleKindMaySeemsTurnsNaturalCitiesSilenceDoorsRocksStrangeWallSolitudeDistanceSpeciesAbsenceHummingRemote Places
Book:A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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“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.”

YearsHas BeensDesireEmotionColorSolitudeMountainBlueMovedDistanceEdgesRangeHorizonWhere You AreFar AwayMountain Ranges
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“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.”

YearsHumansHas BeensMadeDifferentMightMotherThreeFatherParentStruggleUnderstoodScalesVersionsPerceiveGiantsBeing YourselfOver YouMight Have BeenContradictoryChaoticTrinityAppease
Book:The Faraway Nearby
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“Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable.”

PeopleWorldStillsWholeProblemStuffSpaceCitiesAirPossibilityWalkingGardenSurpriseStrangerAttractionArchitectureWanderWildernessThirstVegasLas VegasPlaces In The WorldRecoveringOasisSpectaclesPedestriansUnfriendly
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“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.”

LongJobsArtistProcessDarkKnownDoorsMysterySeaScientistEdgesBoundariesInvitesSignalsArrivalsUnfamiliarFishermanHaul
Book:A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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“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.”

WorldNeedsSelfSometimesStoriesSpaceTroubleDespairDeeperRedemptionChestsOpennessRoutesHollowClutchDig DeepSmall Spaces
Book:The Faraway Nearby
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“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.”

WorldLoveNeedsReasonEnoughHateTeacherMovementThis WorldMetsResourcesUniversityClothingsShelterDistributionHousing
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“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.”

WellsPurposeSleepSpaceCitiesDesignCitizensWalkingBuiltIdealsShoesOrganizedCitizenshipParticipationPublic LifeGreat Cities
Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
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“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.”

ThinkingWayMindKindSeemsWalksJourneyWalkingSeriesRhythmWanderOne WayLandscapeOddFeaturesInternalsPassagesHikingEchoesNew ThoughtTrekkingStrollingSaunteringTraverseWalking MeditationConsonance
Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
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“The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.”

DifferentSpiritualWalksJourneySubjectsParticularWalkingEatingUniversalWanderArtisticBreathingRevolutionaryHikingEroticTrekkingStrollingSauntering
Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
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