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Books are solitudes in which we meet.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Meet
Books
Book
Solitudes
Solitude

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
Rebecca Solnit
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That's what I'm trying to get over: the idea that anarchism offers a description of equitable relations that go way back rather than a hypothesis of what the future should look like.
Rebecca Solnit
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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
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Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
Rebecca Solnit
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Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.
Rebecca Solnit
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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
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They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
Rebecca Solnit
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We fly we dream in darkness we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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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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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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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
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Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
Rebecca Solnit
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A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.
Rebecca Solnit