Search quotes

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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
defa5cf	The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.		love wanderlust journey	Rebecca Solnit
f7fbda7	Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.		spirituality	Rebecca Solnit
c447ee7	The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.		loss letting-go	Rebecca Solnit
e261b36	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 unknow..		nature page-165	Rebecca Solnit
2fae6ba	Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.			Rebecca Solnit
e7d0439	Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.			Rebecca Solnit
632d052	To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.		wanderlust	Rebecca Solnit
a4442b8	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.		color distance wanderlust	Rebecca Solnit
20792b4	Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.		possiblity cities language walking	Rebecca Solnit
2da58c0	The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.		stars meaning stories	Rebecca Solnit
516dc69	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.		jane-austen page-100 walking	Rebecca Solnit
db08cbf	I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map...nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when in Benjamin's terms, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Mo..		nature wanderlust journey	Rebecca Solnit
36d5cba	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.			Rebecca Solnit
1b51467	Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.		women-s-stories	Rebecca Solnit
dd7d2f5	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.			Rebecca Solnit
b1c4733	How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Cote d'Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her export products, not her own identity. Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power. Her name was poverty...		feminism fables possibilities	Rebecca Solnit
e755345	Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your..			Rebecca Solnit
d48c8ee	Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange drea..			Rebecca Solnit
b04aac8	Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.			Rebecca Solnit
877055f	Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes..			Rebecca Solnit
684b614	The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.		magic errand street	Rebecca Solnit
ae581d8	In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost ..		pat-barker page-81 transformation	Rebecca Solnit
371a1c4	Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.			Rebecca Solnit
fd87466	A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.		walking	Rebecca Solnit
a8fef1d	We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.		violence-against-women sexism	Rebecca Solnit
9eef3e1	Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.			Rebecca Solnit
351522c	Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.		perfection page-81	Rebecca Solnit
9a07ea4	to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender...		presence uncertainty mystery surrender	Rebecca Solnit
102e590	We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't.			Rebecca Solnit
b6a96d1	Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.		writing storytelling readers	Rebecca Solnit
5d52a11	A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.		path	Rebecca Solnit
9e66fd9	I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels		feminism architecture landscape	Rebecca Solnit
120af0e	For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.			Rebecca Solnit
a337aa3	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.		words literature reading	Rebecca Solnit
c6232a0	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?"		inspiration love wisdom	Rebecca Solnit
d2a8773	A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.		labyrinth walking maps	Rebecca Solnit
a034068	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.		page-171 urban-planning walking	Rebecca Solnit
e6288ff	Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.		page-178 italy urban-planning walking	Rebecca Solnit
f3454e2	Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth--and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mil..		feminism	Rebecca Solnit
87a7358	To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.			Rebecca Solnit
6d3e9d0	Women's liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful.			Rebecca Solnit
1bb1e15	The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.			Rebecca Solnit
e7657be	Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness.			Rebecca Solnit
fb9730d	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.			Rebecca Solnit

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