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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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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Years
Whose
Allow
Temperature
World
Millions
Including
Precisely
Small
Species
Forests
Water
Gift
Nearly
Bigs
Planets
Atmosphere
Living
Ocean
Weather
Calibrated
Everything
Large
Seasons
Oceans
Great
Air
Planet
Flourish

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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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We fly we dream in darkness we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
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Books are solitudes in which we meet.
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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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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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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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A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.
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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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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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Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.
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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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Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
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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.
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The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
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Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be apolitical is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.
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Credibility is a basic survival tool.
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Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
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Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.... hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.
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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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