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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.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Life
Parts
Fans
Public
Society
Bigs
Vigor
Political
Engagement
America
Latin
Many
Civil

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.
Rebecca Solnit
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Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
Rebecca Solnit
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Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
Rebecca Solnit
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Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
Rebecca Solnit
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story ... The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
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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Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
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
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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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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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Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
Rebecca Solnit
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To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.
Rebecca Solnit
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Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.
Rebecca Solnit
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A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.
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
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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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[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.
Rebecca Solnit
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I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
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