quotes by Rebecca Solnit

"When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"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 articulates both physical and mental freedom."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.'"
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly."
— Rebecca Solnit

"Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible."
— Rebecca Solnit (Hope in the Dark)

"The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"'All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"'They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest)."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"...the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found..."
— Rebecca Solnit

"Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"...the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the abandonment of the original sites of bodily exertion."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.'"
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.'"
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"One [project of Teddy Cruz's] is titled Living Rooms at the Border. it takes a piece of land with an unused church zoned for three units and carefully arrays on it twelve affordable housing units, a community center (the converted church), offices for Casa in the church's attic, and a garden that can accommodate street markets and kiosks. 'In a place where current regulation allows only one use,' [Cruz} crows, ' we propose five different uses that support each other. This suggests a model of social sustainability for San Diego, one that conveys density not as bulk but as social choreography.' For both architect and patron, it's an exciting opportunity to prove that breaking the zoning codes can be for the best. Another one of Cruz's core beliefs is that if architects are going to achieve anything of social distinction, they will have to become developers' collaborators or developers themselves, rather than hirelings brought in after a project's parameters are laid out. "
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"The promenade is a special subset of walking."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Roads are a record of those who have gone before."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Walking is a pastime rather than an avocation."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"[Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nautre, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn't fit into Walden's narrative. He went to jail both because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended and because he felt passionately enough about national affairs to refuse to pay his tax. To be in the woods was not to be out of society or politics."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"...in English the word 'peripatetic' means 'one who walks habitually and extensively.'"
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Home is everything you can walk to."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"The planting of [orchards] represents a reduction of a complex ecology into the monocultural grid of modern agriculture, and the transformation of a complex symbiosis with the land into the simpler piecework or agricultural labour for surplus and export."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"The anthropoligical theorist Paul Shepard writes, 'Humans intuitivesly see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own inner world. If they conceive the former as a chaos of anarchic forces or as dead and frozen, then so will they perceive their own bodies and society; so will they think and act on that assumption and vindicate their own ideas by altering the world to fit them.' The loss of a relationship to the nonconstructed world is a loss of these metaphors. It is also loss of the large territory of the senses, a vast and irreplaceable loss of pleasure and meaning."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"'A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by parallel ways (subplots), or deceptively fork into blind alleys like the althernative scenerios explored in a detective novel.'"
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because species disappear when their habitat does, he photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, card from the deck of the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another. Plants and animals are a language, even in our reduced, domesticated English, where children grow like weeds or come out smelling like roses, the market is made up of bulls and bears, politics of hawks and doves. Like cards, flora and fauna could be read again and again, not only alone but in combination, in the endlessly shifting combinations of a nature that tells its own stories and colors ours, a nature we are losing without even knowing the extent of that loss."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together."
— Rebecca Solnit (Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West)

"A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"[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."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)