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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.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Story
Art
Place
Stories
Geography
Firsts
Storyteller
First
Traveling
Way
Empathy
Imagination

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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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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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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While a lot of people want to join the left to react against the mainstream or right, I in many ways react against the left - not a lot of its fundamental commitments, but its often dismal tone, righteousness, defeatism, etc.
Rebecca Solnit
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The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.
Rebecca Solnit
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Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.
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 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
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To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.
Rebecca Solnit
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A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.
Rebecca Solnit
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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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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
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.
Rebecca Solnit
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I walk wherever my errands take me.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
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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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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A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
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