Rebecca Solnit Quotes About Walking

Quotes about: Walking

• The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. The creates an odd consonance between
  internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was
  there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Journey, Hiking

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.11, Penguin

• A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Journey, Hiking, Landscape

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.54, Penguin

• Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Nature, Journey, Ecosystems

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.190, Penguin

• Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Journey, Hiking, Body

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.28, Penguin

• Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Feet, Space, People

• Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production - oriented society and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Done, Doing Nothing

  "Thinking on Her Feet / Author Rebecca Solnit wrote a book about walking -- while on the move". Interview with Sam Whiting, www.sfgate.com. May 2, 2000.

• 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

  Cities, Imagination, Quality

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.133, Penguin

• For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Pride, Journey, Thinking

• 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

  Cities, Way, Limits

• [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

  Hiking, Looks, Stories

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.111, Penguin

• 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

  Writing, Elements, Narrative

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.203, Penguin

• 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.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Sleep, Cities, Shoes

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.136, Penguin

• 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

  Spiritual, Journey, Hiking

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.10, Penguin

• 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

  Journey, Hiking, Knowing

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.27, Penguin

• 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

  Alienation, Walkers, Lone

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.36, Granta Books

• 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

  Journey, Hiking, Mountain

• EXPLORING the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Exploring The World, Mind, Way

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.16, Penguin

• As I started to pursue the subject more deeply I realized that walking was this wonderful meandering path through everything I was already interested in - gender politics, public space and urban life, demonstrations and parades and marches. The relationship between walking and thinking and between the mind and the body.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Space, Mind

  "Thinking on Her Feet / Author Rebecca Solnit wrote a book about walking -- while on the move" by Sam Whiting, www.sfgate.com. May 02, 2000.

• Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Garden, Vegas, Oasis

• The promenade is a special subset of walking.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Special, Promenade, Walking

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.53, Penguin

• It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Memories, Exploring The World, Giving

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.16, Penguin

• Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.

  Rebecca Solnit

  World, Body, Busy

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.11, Penguin

• Walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Trekking, Strolling, Walking

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.109, Granta Books

• I think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, People, Way

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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

  Heart, Breathing, Balance

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.11, Penguin

Page 1 of 2

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin