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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.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Talk
Space
Citizen
Free
Seldom
Everyone
Politicians
Life
Appear
Politician
Citizens
Public

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Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
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I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
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We are often in two places at once. In fact we are usually in at least two places and occasionally the contrast is evident....Here, most often, is nothing more than the best perspective to contemplate there.
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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.
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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.
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The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they risk themselves for others. We improvise the conditions of survival beautifully.
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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.
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...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.
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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.
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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.
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All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
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Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.
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The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People are actually very good at being communists in the sense that they instantly abandon capitalism, that they love these relationships of mutual aid, because the astonishing thing about disasters is that people are often weirdly joyous in them, because they've recovered a sense of agency, a sense of power, etc.
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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.
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The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
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A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.
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