Quote

I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.

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
Shooting
Picture
Amazed
Outside
Survived
Inside
Fifteen
Fall
Flames
World
Edge
Edges
Falling

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
Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story ... The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Credibility is a basic survival tool.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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
Image
...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Books are solitudes in which we meet.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
While a lot of people want to join the left to react against the mainstream or right, I in many ways react against the left - not a lot of its fundamental commitments, but its often dismal tone, righteousness, defeatism, etc.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
I see disaster everywhere I also […] see generosity and resistance everywhere.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What gets called 'the sixties' left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems the most fundamental and most pervasive in all the ensuing changes is the loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of science, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
I feel like we're in a truly revolutionary period, not just in terms of practical activities to overthrow regimes in the Middle East or Occupy but also in terms of radical redefinitions. I feel like workers are a big part of it, but there's so much more going on.
Rebecca Solnit