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The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces] we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Offers
Spaces
Creatures
Symbolic
Marianne
Poet
Destination
Famously
Possibility
Imaginary
Toads
Space
Cross
Moore
Real
Crosses
Travelling
Even
Wrote
Labyrinth
Really
Garden
Gardens

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Credibility is a basic survival tool.
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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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...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.
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We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen.
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Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
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We fly we dream in darkness we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
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A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
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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.
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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.
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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