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To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Hope
Makes
Give
Giving
Annihilation
Commitment
Present
Future

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We fly we dream in darkness we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
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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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A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.
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...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.
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Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
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You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.
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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!
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In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.
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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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Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
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In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.
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Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
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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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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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I see disaster everywhere I also […] see generosity and resistance everywhere.
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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Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
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Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
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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.
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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