Rebecca Solnit Quotes - Page 7

Quotes about:

• We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Blue, Space, Focus

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.40, Canongate Books

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mountain, Earth, Landscape

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.105, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Grateful, Rights, Voice

  "Men Explain Things to Me — Facts Didn’t Get in the Way" by Rebecca Solnit, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 20, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Spring, Bravery, Bud

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness”, p.22, Trinity University Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.138, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Rain, Coffee, Adventure

  4 Copy quote

• ...the questions a photographer raises may be more profound than the answers the medium permits.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Profound, Answers, May

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.136, Univ of California Press

  4 Copy quote

• [On the] question of why we might want to look at images even more than the real thing: I think there is some quality when you look at an image of, not only seeing this thing, whether it's the horse or the sky, but you are seeing somebody point at it and say, Look!

  Rebecca Solnit

  Horse, Real, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Meaningful, Army, People

  "The growth of local power is a bright spot in seven bleak years of Bush" by Rebecca Solnit, www.theguardian.com. December 28, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• Think of civil society and the state as joined in a marriage of necessity. You already know who the wife is, the one who is supposed to love, cherish and obey: that's civil society. Think of the state as the domineering husband who expects to have a monopoly on power, on violence, on planning and policymaking.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Husband, Thinking, Wife

  4 Copy quote

• ...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

  Home, Survival, Habitat

  4 Copy quote

• More and more I think of privatisation as being not just about the takeover of resources and power by corporate interests, but as the retreat of citizens to private life and private space, screened from solidarity with strangers and increasingly afraid or even unable to imagine acting in public.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Space, Acting

  "Democracy should be exercised regularly, on foot" by Rebecca Solnit, www.theguardian.com. July 5, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

• Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communications and corporate backroom deals.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Communication, Fate, World

  "Democracy should be exercised regularly, on foot" by Rebecca Solnit, www.theguardian.com. July 05, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

• At a certain fork in the road of automatization, Europeans chose to have more time, and they work far less than we do and get much longer vacations. We chose to have more stuff, the stuff sold to us through those beckoning adjectives-bigger, better, faster: Jet Skis, extra cars, second homes, motor homes, towering slab TVs, if not the time to enjoy them or to enjoy less commodified pleasures.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Home, Vacation, Car

  4 Copy quote

• It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Lying, Climate, Aliens

  "Jurassic Ballot: When Corporations Ruled the Earthrop 23" by Rebecca Solnit, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 25, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• I walk wherever my errands take me.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Errands, Take Me, Walks

  "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.

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Change, Loss, Government

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Two, Anxiety, Matter

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness”, p.259, Trinity University Press

  14 Copy quote

• Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat ... ('you're breaking up' is the cry of our time).

  Rebecca Solnit

  Communication, Technology, Phones

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness”, p.258, Trinity University Press

  4 Copy quote

• We are moving into a world of unaccountable and secretive corporations that manage all our communications and work hand in hand with governments to make us visible to them. Our privacy is being strip-mined and hoarded.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Moving, Communication, Government

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Islands, Bird, Library

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.116, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Space, Citizens, Politician

  "Democracy should be exercised regularly, on foot" by Rebecca Solnit, www.theguardian.com. July 5, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

• Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Wall, Distance, Rocks

  Rebecca Solnit (2006). “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, p.68, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Fall, Flames, Shooting Up

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.100, Canongate Books

  4 Copy quote

Page 7 of 8

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin