Quotessence
Home / Authors / Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllWalkingWorldActivismHopePeopleWayPoliticsThinkingFeminismImaginationSpaceWalksLandscapeWritingKnowsLostStoriesJourneyWanderBody

Famous Rebecca Solnit Quotes

“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 It is an observer's state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create.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
Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Create image

“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
Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Create image

“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
Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Create image

“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
Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Create image

“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.”

ThinkingWorldHouseSocialWalksJourneyPrideReaderWalkingPrejudiceIndependenceWanderSpheresHikingSolitaryJaneTrekkingStrollingHeroinesSaunteringAustenDarcy
Author:Rebecca Solnit
Create image

“The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).”

WalksStudyJourneyMastersWalkingMountainWanderParadoxDestinationPerpetualHikingClosestTrekkingStrollingSaunteringParables
Author:Rebecca Solnit
Create image

“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
Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Create image

“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
Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image