Quote

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Past
Picking
Whole
Fit
Way
Events
Never
Present
Life
Forever
Story
Rearranges
Tell
Milky
Stories
Constellations

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.
Rebecca Solnit
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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
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People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
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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Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
Rebecca Solnit
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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
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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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I walk wherever my errands take me.
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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Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
Rebecca Solnit
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....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
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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
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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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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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The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
Rebecca Solnit
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[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
Rebecca Solnit
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Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.
Rebecca Solnit