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Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Brings
Destruction
Lost
Live
Never

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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They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
Rebecca Solnit
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A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca Solnit
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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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The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.
Rebecca Solnit
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There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.
Rebecca Solnit
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Books are solitudes in which we meet.
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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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.
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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...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.
Rebecca Solnit
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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
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The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).
Rebecca Solnit
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[On the] question of why we might want to look at images even more than the real thing: I think there is some quality when you look at an image of, not only seeing this thing, whether it's the horse or the sky, but you are seeing somebody point at it and say, Look!
Rebecca Solnit
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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
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A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.
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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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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Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.
Rebecca Solnit
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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