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

...I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...

Rebecca Solnit

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

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

Rebecca Solnit

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 wh...

Rebecca Solnit

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

...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 t...

Rebecca Solnit

The promenade is a special subset of walking.

Rebecca Solnit

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 kno...

Rebecca Solnit

Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.

Rebecca Solnit

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

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, ...

Rebecca Solnit

A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events...

Rebecca Solnit

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, ...

Rebecca Solnit

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between…Too, the rhetoric of efficiency ...

Rebecca Solnit

Walking is a pastime rather than an avocation.

Rebecca Solnit

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...

Rebecca Solnit

The world you live in is not a given; much of what is best in it has been built through the struggles of passionate activists over the last centuries. They won us many freedoms and protected many beauties. Count those gifts among your growing heap.

Rebecca Solnit

I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map…nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I ...

Rebecca Solnit

Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.

Rebecca Solnit

To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable...

Rebecca Solnit

I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first fo...

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