|
3359091
|
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.
|
|
page-255
walking
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
ff91588
|
Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
|
|
walking
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
dbb1b5d
|
In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
|
|
mountains
nature
page-144
walking
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
b58c9da
|
Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake...when you give yourself to places, they give you..
|
|
travel
walking
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
122ee64
|
Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a book to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
b9af1d0
|
Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
04fde5d
|
you don't have the memory of your future; {that}the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
759bc53
|
One of the reasons people lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity is the belief that children are the way to fulfill your capacity to love. But there are so many things to love besides one's own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
fab4f1a
|
The coolness of Buddhism isn't indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as whole, see all the islands and the routes between them. Up close it all dissolves into texture and incoherence and immersion, like a face going out of focus just before a kiss.
|
|
clarity
emotions
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
373aa7f
|
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 allegory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).
|
|
mountains
nature
page-137
walking
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
64781bf
|
Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
b231296
|
After my book Wanderlust came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of my own perceptions and interpretations. On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest- in a nutshell, female.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
4d712f0
|
When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything b..
|
|
babies
childhood
children
family
family-relationships
motherhood
mothering
mothers
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
3a52338
|
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes-you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, a alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fin..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
bdcf099
|
Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.
|
|
hope
politics
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
7a5d5bd
|
Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
8ef1121
|
To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
|
|
change
inspiration
politics
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
609dc56
|
Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.
|
|
walking
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
421660d
|
We tend to treat violence and the abuse of power as though they fit into airtight categories: harassment, intimidation, threat, battery, rape, murder. But I realize now that what I was saying is: it's a slippery slope. That's why we need to address that slope, rather than compartmentalizing the varieties of misogyny and dealing with each separately. Doing so has meant fragmenting the picture, seeing the parts, not the whole.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
6ab262a
|
the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the abandonment of the original sites of bodily exertion.
|
|
exercise
gym
page-260
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
ee8567f
|
A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.
|
|
mountains
nature
page-135
walking
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
3a8257e
|
There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
b40a700
|
I wish that I could put up yesterday's evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony, ten thousand glorious days of clouds that will instead vanish and never be seen again, line them up in jars where they might be admired in the interim and tasted again as needed.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
eb71482
|
In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.
|
|
page-258
walking
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
778b12f
|
The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
7675972
|
I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.
|
|
nature
page-49
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
90c62aa
|
Some people love their story that much even if it's of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don't know how to stop telling it. Maybe it's about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear--you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself
|
|
comfort
fear
story
unknown
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
d11f3a4
|
Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
|
|
landscape
nature
page-66
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
649d8a9
|
The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
d038739
|
Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lies,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations." Thoreau is playing with the biblical question about what it profits a man i..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
ed5dd08
|
To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.
|
|
writing
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
3fa2424
|
Love is a constant negotiation, a constant conversation; to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort. It is an arena in which you are not in control, because someone else also has rights and decisions; it is a collaborative process; making love is at its best a process in which those negotiations become joy and play.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
31113b2
|
Feminism, as writer Marie Sheer remarked in 1986, "is the radical notion that women are people," a notion not universally accepted but spreading nonetheless."
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
f576f07
|
I was asked to talk to a roomful of undergraduates in a university in a beautiful coastal valley. I talked about place, about the way we often talk about love of place, but seldom how places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer familiarity that allows some portion of our lives to remain collected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
6aa4d9b
|
Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
203fe1a
|
Inside the word "emergency" is "emerge"; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters."
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
c3a26fb
|
It's the way some men say, "I'm not the problem" or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, "What do they want--a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?" Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes that's more important to talk about than protecting male comfor..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
d34e88c
|
There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
39ed6ec
|
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.
|
|
walking
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
436bd66
|
We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
02709cb
|
It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible "Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family". It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to th..
|
|
feminism
gender
rebecca-solnit
violence
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
c1b4953
|
Paradise is not the place in which you arrive but the journey toward it. Sometimes I think victories must be temporary or incomplete; what kind of humanity would survive paradise? The industrialized world has tried to approximate paradise in its suburbs, with luxe, calme, volupte, cul-de-sacs, cable television and two-car garages, and it has produced a soft ennui that shades over into despair and a decay of the soul suggesting that Paradise..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
ea2fe0d
|
The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on. We make ourselves and in so doing are the gods of the small universe of self and the large world of repercussions.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
8d04952
|
Some empathy must be learned and then imagined, by perceiving the suffering of others and translating it into one's own experience of suffering and thereby suffering a little with then. Empathy can be a story you tell yourself about what it must be like to be that other person; but its lack can also arrive from narrative, about why the sufferer deserved it, or why that person or those people have nothing to do with you. Whole societies can ..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |