Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

About Rebecca Solnit:

Rebecca Solnit is a writer who lives in San Francisco, California. She has written on a variety of subjects, including the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where bi-monthly she writes the magazine's "Easy Chair" essay.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.

Rebecca Solnit

The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most sy...

Rebecca Solnit

No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.

Rebecca Solnit

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

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...

Rebecca Solnit

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

The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice i...

Rebecca Solnit

...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 exer...

Rebecca Solnit

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, lo...

Rebecca Solnit

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes ste...

Rebecca Solnit

Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

Rebecca Solnit

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.

Rebecca Solnit

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.

Rebecca Solnit

[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

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 in...

Rebecca Solnit

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...

Rebecca Solnit

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 ...

Rebecca Solnit

Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, ...

Rebecca Solnit

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

Rebecca Solnit

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...

Rebecca Solnit

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

Author Bio

  • NameRebecca Solnit
  • DescriptionAuthor and essayist from United States
  • BornJune 11, 1961
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionArt Historian; Journalist; Author
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship