Quote

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Matter
Passionate
Need
Identity
Needs
Anyone
Shackles
Even
Getting
Geography
Much
Desire
Urgent
Think
Lost
Shake
Thinking
Others
Shakes
Become
Remind

More quotes by 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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Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
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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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Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
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Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.... hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.
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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 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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For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.
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The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.
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Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.
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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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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.
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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Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.
Rebecca Solnit
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Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
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Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
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The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.
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A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
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For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you're some place that's already interesting. You're not just between places. Things are happening.
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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