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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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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Build
Sanctuary
Compasses
Story
Directions
Tundra
Lost
Compass
Sanctuaries
Stories
Ice
Spreads
Without
Architecture
Arctic
Like
Spread
Vastness
World
Prison
Prisons
Sea
Navigate

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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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
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Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
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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Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be apolitical is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.
Rebecca Solnit
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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
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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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Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.
Rebecca Solnit
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I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels
Rebecca Solnit
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There is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that we bathe in information but hardly absorb or analyse it. Data are interrupted by other data before we've thought about the first round, and contemplating three streams of data at once may be a way to think about none of them.
Rebecca Solnit
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Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
Rebecca Solnit
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Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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Books are solitudes in which we meet.
Rebecca Solnit
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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
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it.
Rebecca Solnit
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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
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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.
Rebecca Solnit