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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
Way
Fundamental
Dismal
People
Fundamentals
Commitments
Commitment
React
Ways
Etc
Often
Righteousness
Left
Join
Right
Mainstream
Many
Tone
Defeatism

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
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A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.
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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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Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
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Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.
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There is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that we bathe in information but hardly absorb or analyse it. Data are interrupted by other data before we've thought about the first round, and contemplating three streams of data at once may be a way to think about none of them.
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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The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.
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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.
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The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
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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Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.
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.
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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.
Rebecca Solnit
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Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
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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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The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.
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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