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Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Terrain
Spectacle
Landscape
Space
Experience
Vanished

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
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There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
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A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
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You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.
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The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.
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Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
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We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.
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Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
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I feel like we're in a truly revolutionary period, not just in terms of practical activities to overthrow regimes in the Middle East or Occupy but also in terms of radical redefinitions. I feel like workers are a big part of it, but there's so much more going on.
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Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
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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.
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Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
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There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.
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A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
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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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As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
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Anarchists believe that we can govern ourselves in the absence of coercive and centralized authority the underlying premise about human nature (to use an infinitely problematized but necessary term here) is fundamentally positive. And the evidence that in disasters people are really pretty kind, generous, brave, resourceful and creative fed that.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
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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.
Rebecca Solnit