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[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

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
History
Walking
Mountaineering
Experience
Becomes
Optional
Stories
Public
Hiking
Become
High
Wander
Part
Getting
Narrative
Look
Story
Main
Looks
Point
Private
Even
Rather
Places

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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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.
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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 poor have often been subversive just because they don't always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work.
Rebecca Solnit
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Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.
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Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
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All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
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Books are solitudes in which we meet.
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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).
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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
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I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
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A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
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.
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I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.
Rebecca Solnit
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You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.
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.
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It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.
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Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.
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Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
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We fly we dream in darkness we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
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The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
Rebecca Solnit