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Quote by Rebecca Solnit

“The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.”

Quote by Rebecca Solnit

Author

Rebecca Solnit is an American writer known for her works on environmental, cultural, political, and social issues. Her writing spans a wide range of topics, including nature, travel, gender, and power. Her books include 'Wanderlust', 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost', and 'The Faraway Nearby'. more

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“I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.”

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Book:A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production - oriented society and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.”

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

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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.”

Source: The Faraway Nearby

“We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.”

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Author:Rebecca Solnit

“Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

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Book:Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays

Source: Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays

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

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Book:A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.”

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Book:A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.”

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Author:Rebecca Solnit

“We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen.”

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Author:Rebecca Solnit