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You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Things
Strange
Called
Desire
Lost
Found
Place

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
Rebecca Solnit
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There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.
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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We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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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!
Rebecca Solnit
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We are often in two places at once. In fact we are usually in at least two places and occasionally the contrast is evident....Here, most often, is nothing more than the best perspective to contemplate there.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.
Rebecca Solnit
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Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
Rebecca Solnit
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Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca Solnit
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Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
Rebecca Solnit