May > May's Quotes

“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

“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

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Many of these policies were proposed by wonks who are comfortable only with traits and correlations that can be measured and quantified. They were passed through legislative committees that are as capable of speaking about the deep wellsprings of human action as they are of speaking in ancient Aramaic. They were executed by officials that have only the most superficial grasp of what is immovable and bent about human beings. So of course they failed. And they will continue to fail unless the new knowledge about our true makeup is integrated more fully into the world of public policy, unless the enchanted story is told along with the prosaic one.”
― David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

“Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“What are men to rocks and mountains?”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale