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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.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Walks
Breathing
Invested
Particular
Artistic
Erotic
Spiritual
Subject
Hiking
Sense
Universal
Invest
Wildly
Different
Eating
Wander
Sauntering
Like
Subjects
Cultural
Trekking
Walking
Revolutionary
Strolling
Journey
Acts
Meanings

More quotes by 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.
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We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.
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All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
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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.
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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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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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Anarchists believe that we can govern ourselves in the absence of coercive and centralized authority the underlying premise about human nature (to use an infinitely problematized but necessary term here) is fundamentally positive. And the evidence that in disasters people are really pretty kind, generous, brave, resourceful and creative fed that.
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Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook... But we don't need everyone on board we don't need one magic person in office we need ourselves. To act. It's the wind, not the weathervanes.
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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.
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For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us - the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small - to flourish.
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.
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Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
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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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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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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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Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
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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.
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The fight for free space-for wilderness and for public space-must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.
Rebecca Solnit
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The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces] we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.
Rebecca Solnit