Top 207 Quotes & Sayings by Rebecca Solnit - Page 4

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't.

I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.

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.

I don't think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it's loved by enough people that I'm grateful and able to keep going.

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.

No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.

I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.

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.

I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.

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.

For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.

There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.

Sure, you can say nuclear power is somewhat less carbon-intensive than burning fossil fuels for energy; beating your children to death with a club will prevent them from getting hit by a car. Ravaging the Earth by one irreparable means is not a sensible way to prevent it from being destroyed by another. There are alternatives. We should choose them and use them.

For me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive - Mexico City's big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change.

Anarchists believe that we can govern ourselves in the absence of coercive and centralized authority; the underlying premise about human nature (to use an infinitely problematized but necessary term here) is fundamentally positive. And the evidence that in disasters people are really pretty kind, generous, brave, resourceful and creative fed that.

I think that fear of the mob, the expectation that people, particularly poor and nonwhite people become mobs almost automatically in the absence of coercive authority, is inculcated by the media, the movies, and politicians.

What is kind of beautiful about Katrina is that even though the media and officials are working hard at telling us everyone in New Orleans was a monster, in the immediate aftermath more than 200,000 people invite displaced strangers into their homes through hurricanehousing.org and an uncounted horde go to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to give, to love, to be in solidarity, and to rebuild.

There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

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

I am against resources being controlled by corporations, but that doesn't mean I want them controlled by the state.

Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.

I've been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.

Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

The oil corporations spend a lot of money to get, say, the tar sands pipeline through, but nobody's - you know, there are definitely environmentalists being paid - but a lot of people are acting for something other than financial compensation. So if the tar sands pipeline doesn't get made, it's because a huge amount of people are doing something that doesn't involve remuneration, money, etc., because we're not actually the self-interested financial instruments that economists like to imagine we are.

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

In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn.

You don't have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don't have to drop the pleasures of style