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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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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Ways
Etc
Often
Righteousness
Left
Join
Right
Mainstream
Many
Tone
Defeatism
Way
Fundamental
Dismal
People
Fundamentals
Commitments
Commitment
React

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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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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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.
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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Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.
Rebecca Solnit
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...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.
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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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
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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To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
Rebecca Solnit
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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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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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In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.
Rebecca Solnit
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I walk wherever my errands take me.
Rebecca Solnit
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All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
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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We are often in two places at once. In fact we are usually in at least two places and occasionally the contrast is evident....Here, most often, is nothing more than the best perspective to contemplate there.
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