“I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I'd moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share
“When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
“One of the reasons people lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity is the belief that children are the way… — 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 was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby, within the boundaries of the self. You can be a thousand miles from the person next to… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share
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 it was the only way she could break away from her mother, maybe Demeter was a bad parent the way Lear was a bad parent, denying nature, including the nature of children to leave their parents.… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share
[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