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Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
World
Allows
Bodies
Busy
Walking
Body
Without
Made

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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Think of civil society and the state as joined in a marriage of necessity. You already know who the wife is, the one who is supposed to love, cherish and obey: that's civil society. Think of the state as the domineering husband who expects to have a monopoly on power, on violence, on planning and policymaking.
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A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.
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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 get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.
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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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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 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.
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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 turn down an adventure without a really good reason.
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There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
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Books are solitudes in which we meet.
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A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
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A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
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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.
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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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It's all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.
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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.
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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.
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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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