History Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

14 History quotes by Rebecca Solnit

All History quotes Rebecca Solnit’s page

Solnit’s knack for linking personal stories to larger currents shines through these fourteen observations, offering fresh angles on how we remember and act.

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“What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.”

Rebecca Solnit

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“Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water…

Rebecca Solnit

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“Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a…

Rebecca Solnit

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“Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place…

Rebecca Solnit

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“Some species of trees spread root systems underground that interconnect the individual trunks and weave the individual trees into a more stable…

Rebecca Solnit

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As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that…

Rebecca Solnit

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[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather…

Rebecca Solnit

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“We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in…

Rebecca Solnit

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“As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to…

Rebecca Solnit

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“Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, “were always lost, because they’d never been to these places…

Rebecca Solnit

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“One whose testimony made a major impact more than a decade ago is Ben Barres, formerly Barbara Barres, a biologist at Stanford…

Rebecca Solnit

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“...the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your…

Rebecca Solnit

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“Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse…

Rebecca Solnit

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“The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers…

Rebecca Solnit

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“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

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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

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“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

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“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

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“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

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“I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.”

Rebecca Solnit

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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

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“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

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[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

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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

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“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

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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

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“Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It’s a boon to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It’s for all of us.”

Rebecca Solnit

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“Mountaineering is always spoken of as though summiting is conquest, but as you get higher, the world gets bigger, and you feel smaller in…

Rebecca Solnit

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“A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.”

Rebecca Solnit

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