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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.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Impulse
Belief
Powerful
Bigs
War
Hurricane
Social
Impulses
Way
Hurricanes
Beliefs

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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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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Credibility is a basic survival tool.
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I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
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Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca Solnit
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You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.
Rebecca Solnit
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[On the] question of why we might want to look at images even more than the real thing: I think there is some quality when you look at an image of, not only seeing this thing, whether it's the horse or the sky, but you are seeing somebody point at it and say, Look!
Rebecca Solnit
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I walk wherever my errands take me.
Rebecca Solnit
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Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
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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Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
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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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
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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Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
Rebecca Solnit
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Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
Rebecca Solnit
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The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.
Rebecca Solnit
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As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.
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