A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there. Rebecca Solnit More Quotes by Rebecca Solnit More Quotes From Rebecca Solnit ...the questions a photographer raises may be more profound than the answers the medium permits. Rebecca Solnit answers may profound 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 spurs imagination cities The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women - of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human. Rebecca Solnit library battle men Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. Rebecca Solnit body busy world The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic. Rebecca Solnit hiking journey spiritual Sure, you can say nuclear power is somewhat less carbon-intensive than burning fossil fuels for energy; beating your children to death with a club will prevent them from getting hit by a car. Ravaging the Earth by one irreparable means is not a sensible way to prevent it from being destroyed by another. There are alternatives. We should choose them and use them. Rebecca Solnit car mean children Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. Rebecca Solnit lost long 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 government change loss 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 dream discovery men A restlessness has seized hold of many of us, a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing, or doing at least two things at once, or going to check some other medium. It's an anxiety about keeping up, about not being left out or getting behind. Rebecca Solnit anxiety matter two In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds. Rebecca Solnit library islands bird A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth. Rebecca Solnit landscape mountain earth ...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else. Rebecca Solnit lost The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest). Rebecca Solnit mountain hiking journey A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world. Rebecca Solnit labyrinth differences journey The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany. Rebecca Solnit errands epiphany magic The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures. It weighs the obvious against what in its terms are incomprehensible. When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous-and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It's exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout. Rebecca Solnit environmental safety exercise ...the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the abandonment of the original sites of bodily exertion. Rebecca Solnit habitat survival home The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace. Rebecca Solnit design choices desire 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 italian cities long
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