Quote

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

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
Surprise
Pure
Worry
Surprises
Control
Scenarios
Knowledge
Pretend
Even
Unknown
Much
Prefer
Way
Ugly

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

Image
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
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
Image
For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us - the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small - to flourish.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.
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
Image
Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
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
The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they risk themselves for others. We improvise the conditions of survival beautifully.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
....there are three prerequisites to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints.
Rebecca Solnit