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Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit Quotes

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Famous Rebecca Solnit 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
Book:Wanderlust: A History of Walking
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“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.”

KnowsMenWorldWayDoeSelfHardYoungSilenceTalkingDoubtHeardStreetsFieldsExerciseTrainDareLimitationCrushYoung WomenHarassmentPresumptionSelf-doubtSpeaking UpOverconfidence
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“Sure, you can say nuclear power is somewhat less carbon-intensive than burning fossil fuels for energy; beating your children to death with a club will prevent them from getting hit by a car. Ravaging the Earth by one irreparable means is not a sensible way to prevent it from being destroyed by another. There are alternatives. We should choose them and use them.”

WayShouldMeanChildrenUseEarthEnergyCarOur ChildrenClubsNuclearDestroyedBurningAlternativesYour ChildrenFuelSensibleCarbonFossilsFossil FuelNuclear PowerIrreparableBurning Fossil Fuels
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“There is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that we bathe in information but hardly absorb or analyse it. Data are interrupted by other data before we've thought about the first round, and contemplating three streams of data at once may be a way to think about none of them.”

ThinkingWayFirstsMayThreeAbilityFocusPiecesInformationRoundsDataStreamsContemplatingInterrupted
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that 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.”

WorldWayFirstsMeanArtStoriesLostImaginationSeaFiguresEmpathySpreadArchitectureIceStorytellerCompassLove SomeoneGeographyNavigateTelling StoriesVastnessArctic
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“I often think that the reason capitalism hasn't completely destroyed everything is that a huge amount of anti-capitalist endeavor goes on, from labors of love, nurture, friendship, and barter to gift economies and different kinds of exchanges, not just one alternate model but a whole host of other ways in which we engage with each other and with the world that aren't financial and debt-based.”

ThinkingWorldWayKindDifferentReasonWholeEconomyHugeGoes OnAmountModelsCapitalismLaborFinancialDebtDestroyedJust OneEndeavorHostCapitalistDifferent KindsNurtureLabor Of Love
Author:Rebecca Solnit
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“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.”

PeopleWayBelieveSometimesStoriesShowsMightWaitingHalfWorryFantasyHappenedPureSurpriseUglyAccidentsMapsScenariosSurprise MeAbductionDesertion
Book:A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato) 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. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”

ThinkingKnowsWayWantSelfInspirationSidesGraceBecomingFindingsTransformationBoundariesTerritoryPlatoExtendingLove WisdomBecoming SomeoneBecoming Someone Else
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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“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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