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 More Quotes by Rebecca Solnit More Quotes From Rebecca Solnit The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss. Rebecca Solnit letting-go loss art Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like. Rebecca Solnit environmental brother looks To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere. Rebecca Solnit imagination writing might 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 elements narrative writing Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable. Rebecca Solnit ineffable walkers protect Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth. Rebecca Solnit hiking body journey The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they risk themselves for others. We improvise the conditions of survival beautifully. Rebecca Solnit risk survival people Roads are a record of those who have gone before. Rebecca Solnit records gone When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. 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. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown. Rebecca Solnit worry believe people A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation. Rebecca Solnit lone alienation walkers 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 hiking fighting journey 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. Rebecca Solnit ties goal meaningful When you say 'mother' or 'father' you describe three different phenomena. There is the giant who made you and loomed over your early years; there is whatever more human-scale version might have been possible to perceive later and maybe even befriend; and there is the internalized version of the parent with whom you struggle- to appease, to escape, to be yourself, to understand and be understood by- and they make up a chaotic and contradictory trinity. Rebecca Solnit being-yourself mother father Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy. Rebecca Solnit gender empathy kindness 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 quality imagination cities Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty. Rebecca Solnit dignity liberty survival Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason. Rebecca Solnit turns reason adventure No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more. Rebecca Solnit coming-back matter knows Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go. Rebecca Solnit limits cities way Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live. Rebecca Solnit violence rights people
