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Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Book by Rebecca Solnit · 46 quotes · Walking, World, Body

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Wanderlust: A History of Walking Quotes

“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.”

KnowsWorldWayGivingMindWaitingMemoriesPossibilityWalkingOffersSeedsInvisibleBest WayAssociationExploringCropsNew ThoughtEpiphanyWaiting For YouTerrainNew PlacesNew PossibilitiesSense Of PlaceExploring The World
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“Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. 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.”

KnowsDoeMightImaginationCitiesQualityWalkingFortuneVarietySpursAnonymityGreat CitiesConjunctionsUrban PlanningBakeriesFortune Teller
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“Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.”

KindUseBodyTermNatureSpaceWalksPleasureTroubleJourneyWalkingSpeciesVariousWanderWarningHikingTrekkingStrollingEcosystemsSaunteringFree TimeIndicatorsAlluringWarning SignsEndangerment
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“The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.”

WorldDesireChoicesChanceDesignPossibilityWideArchitectureUrbanSegregationMarketplaceFreedom Of ChoicePredestinationDesire To LiveUrban Design
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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
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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
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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
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“In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one's secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries. This uncharted identity with its illiminable possibilities is one of the distinctive qualities of urban living, a liberatory state for those who come to emansipate themselves from family and community expectation, to experiment with subculture and identity. It is an observer's state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life's most refined pleasures.”

CitiesWalkingSolitudeAlienationObserving
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“The fear of rape puts many women in their place - indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors... I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me—all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behavior rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them—but it had not in me.”

NatureFeminismSolitudeTravelExploreWanderlustRape Culture
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“On ordinary days we each walk alone or with a companion or two on the sidewalks, and the streets are used for transit and for commerce. On extraordinary days—on the holidays that are anniversaries of historic and religious events and on the days we make history ourselves—we walk together, and the whole street is for stamping out the meaning of the day.”

CitiesStreetsWalkingDemonstrationsMarchingUprisings
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“A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by parallel ways (subplots), or deceptively fork into blind alleys like the alternative scenerios explored in a detective novel.”

WalkingGardensLandscape ArchitecturePage 76
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“Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.”

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“The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world which seems to be accelerating around them.”

TechnologyCapitalismOppressionProductionWork Conditions
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“Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. [--] [T]ime spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. 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.”

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