“Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.” — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods.” — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“There are good and great books on the Esquire list, though even Moby-Dick, which I love, reminds me that a book without… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Writing is lonely, it's an intimate talk with the undead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers , with the readers… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda,… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies—though shifting the balance matters—but that maybe the whole point of reading… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers into it . . . They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature? Are the presences in the former, at some… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“In a sense these books on walks for their own sakes are the literature of paradise, the story of what can happen… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its seed or potential, like a music score. It exists… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“As it happens, there are many reasons why I don’t have children: I am very good at birth control; though I love… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Georgia O’Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, “from the faraway nearby.” It… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put ourself in their story, or figure out how… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place without truly… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.” — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
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… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm, maybe… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two places. But to… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
![“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, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking…” quote by Rebecca Solnit](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/654/rebecca-solnit-569_austen_for-jane-austen-and-the-readers-of-pride_2924842.jpg)
![“[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.” quote by Rebecca Solnit](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/1e6/rebecca-solnit-569_high-places_in-mountaineering-if-we-look-for-private_78831.jpg)
