Quote

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.

Rebecca Solnit

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Streets
Magic
Errand
Mingling
Errands
Epiphany
Street

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

Image
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.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you're some place that's already interesting. You're not just between places. Things are happening.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Books are solitudes in which we meet.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook... But we don't need everyone on board we don't need one magic person in office we need ourselves. To act. It's the wind, not the weathervanes.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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 ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
While a lot of people want to join the left to react against the mainstream or right, I in many ways react against the left - not a lot of its fundamental commitments, but its often dismal tone, righteousness, defeatism, etc.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
No one is born a writer literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.
Rebecca Solnit