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. Rebecca Solnit More Quotes by Rebecca Solnit More Quotes From Rebecca Solnit Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it. Rebecca Solnit fighting time war 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 car missing world 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 breathing balance heart Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished. Rebecca Solnit terrain landscape space I feel like we're in a truly revolutionary period, not just in terms of practical activities to overthrow regimes in the Middle East or Occupy but also in terms of radical redefinitions. I feel like workers are a big part of it, but there's so much more going on. Rebecca Solnit middle-east regimes revolutionary It turns out that we're actually capable of something other than neoliberalism and actually we're really capable of enjoying ourselves more than we do under neoliberalism. It feels that if neoliberalism is first about privatizing desire and imagination before the economy, then we're in this process of publicizing it again. Rebecca Solnit neoliberalism imagination desire The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic. Rebecca Solnit garden space real If you look at a lot of traditional societies, they're all organized along what we might call anarchist guidelines, but it's not like the Zapatistas were reading European social theory. Rebecca Solnit reading might looks There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white. Rebecca Solnit shade black-and-white writing Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction. Rebecca Solnit know-how destruction lost Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you. Rebecca Solnit tangible decision memories Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world. Rebecca Solnit hiking knowing journey Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness. Rebecca Solnit modern-life life-is moving I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits? Rebecca Solnit wonder sometimes culture If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway. Rebecca Solnit maturity sorrow loss There was an assumption that aerial bombing of civilians in World War II would cause fragile, working-class people to basically have nervous breakdowns and it would paralyze the state. That was the logic of aerial bombing. In fact, it doesn't happen at all, but the logic behind aerial bombing has never stopped, even though it never demoralizes, terrorizes, or paralyzes a population. Rebecca Solnit class war people When I think about, say, 1995, or whever the last moment was before most of us were on the internet and had mobile phones, it seems like a hundred years ago. ... Time passed in fairly large units, or at least not in milliseconds and constant updates. A few hours wasn't such a long time to go between moments of contact with your work, your people or your trivia. Rebecca Solnit phones time thinking A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want. Rebecca Solnit disagree want heart We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless. Rebecca Solnit fun meaningful needs 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 unexpected imagination dream
