Quote

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

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Cannot
Narrative
Writing
Road
Made
Elements
Time
Walking
Unfolds
Like
Heard
Temporal
Whether
Resemble
Read
Perceived
Language
Element

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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.
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Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.
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A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
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Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
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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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That's what I'm trying to get over: the idea that anarchism offers a description of equitable relations that go way back rather than a hypothesis of what the future should look like.
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Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.
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There is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that we bathe in information but hardly absorb or analyse it. Data are interrupted by other data before we've thought about the first round, and contemplating three streams of data at once may be a way to think about none of them.
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[On the] question of why we might want to look at images even more than the real thing: I think there is some quality when you look at an image of, not only seeing this thing, whether it's the horse or the sky, but you are seeing somebody point at it and say, Look!
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I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
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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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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.
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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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A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.
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All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
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Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
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We fly we dream in darkness we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
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Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
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