The fight for free space-for wilderness and for public space-must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were… — 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
It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense… — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned. — Rebecca Solnit Copy Share Image
Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of… — 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