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

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Might
Landscape
Book
California
Lavishly
Sometimes
Seeds
Germinate
Writing
Decades
Blooms
Fire
Scatter
Books
Dormant
Lying
Rats
Write
Burned

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.
Rebecca Solnit
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To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.
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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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I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.
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I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
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Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
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We fly we dream in darkness we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
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A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.
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...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.
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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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Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
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The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.
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Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
Rebecca Solnit
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Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
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The poor have often been subversive just because they don't always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work.
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There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
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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
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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.
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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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Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca Solnit