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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
Commitment
React
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Often
Righteousness
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I walk wherever my errands take me.
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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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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.
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That's what I'm trying to get over: the idea that anarchism offers a description of equitable relations that go way back rather than a hypothesis of what the future should look like.
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Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.
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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.
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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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A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
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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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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.
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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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For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.
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The poor have often been subversive just because they don't always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work.
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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There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.
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Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
Rebecca Solnit
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....there are three prerequisites to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints.
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.
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We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.
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People are actually very good at being communists in the sense that they instantly abandon capitalism, that they love these relationships of mutual aid, because the astonishing thing about disasters is that people are often weirdly joyous in them, because they've recovered a sense of agency, a sense of power, etc.
Rebecca Solnit