Rebecca Solnit Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• 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

  Exercise, Safety, Environmental

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Ideas, Trying, Looks

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Meaningful, Ties, Goal

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• 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

  Fighting, Journey, Hiking

  9 Copy quote

• 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, Revolutionary, Regimes

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Imagination, Desire, Neoliberalism

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Writing, Black And White, Shade

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• 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

  Memories, Decision, Tangible

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• Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Moving, Modern Life, Life Is

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.15, Penguin

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Loss, Maturity, Sorrow

  Rebecca Solnit (2006). “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, p.24, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Time, Thinking, Phones

  6 Copy quote

• A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Heart, Want, Disagree

  Source: therumpus.net

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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

  Meaningful, Fun, Needs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• People are actually very good at being communists in the sense that they instantly abandon capitalism, that they love these relationships of mutual aid, because the astonishing thing about disasters is that people are often weirdly joyous in them, because they've recovered a sense of agency, a sense of power, etc.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Agency, People, Etc

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• I often think that the reason capitalism hasn't completely destroyed everything is that a huge amount of anti-capitalist endeavor goes on, from labors of love, nurture, friendship, and barter to gift economies and different kinds of exchanges, not just one alternate model but a whole host of other ways in which we engage with each other and with the world that aren't financial and debt-based.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Debt, Goes On

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• It's all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Powerful, War, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

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• We are entering an era of heightened disaster, thanks to climate change. Being prepared for disaster will mean being prepared to sift truth from rumour, and being prepared to adjust our worldview.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Mean, Climate, Entering

  "Four years on, Katrina remains cursed by rumour, cliche, lies and racism" by Rebecca Solnit, www.theguardian.com. August 25, 2009.

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• The Earth we evolved to inhabit is turning into something more turbulent and unreliable at a pace too fast for most living things to adapt to.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Pace, Earth, Living Things

  "Rebecca Solnit: 2013 Will Be Year Zero In Our Climate Battle" by Rebecca Solnit, www.motherjones.com. December 31, 2012.

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• The promenade is a special subset of walking.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Special, Promenade, Walking

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

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• All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Garden, Landscape Painting, Pope

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.99, Granta Books

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Earth, Corporations, Argument

  Source: therumpus.net

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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

  Commitment, People, Fundamentals

  Source: therumpus.net

  12 Copy quote

• ....there are three prerequisites to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Three, Going Out, World

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.178, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

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