Quote

[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

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
Experience
Becomes
Optional
Stories
Public
Hiking
Become
High
Wander
Part
Getting
Narrative
Look
Story
Main
Looks
Point
Private
Even
Rather
Places
History
Walking
Mountaineering

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

Image
Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.
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
Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be apolitical is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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
Image
Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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
Image
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
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
Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
I see disaster everywhere I also […] see generosity and resistance everywhere.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
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.
Rebecca Solnit
Image
The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
Rebecca Solnit