Quote

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

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
Fire
Scatter
Books
Dormant
Lying
Rats
Write
Burned
Might
Landscape
Book
California
Lavishly
Sometimes
Seeds
Germinate
Writing
Decades
Blooms

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

Image
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.
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
People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen.
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
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.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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
Image
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.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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
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
A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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
Image
Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
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
[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.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
It's all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Think of civil society and the state as joined in a marriage of necessity. You already know who the wife is, the one who is supposed to love, cherish and obey: that's civil society. Think of the state as the domineering husband who expects to have a monopoly on power, on violence, on planning and policymaking.
Rebecca Solnit