A Field Guide to Getting Lost Quotes

“Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, ‘were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“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

“Children, Landon said, are good at getting lost, because "the key in survival is knowing you're lost": they don't stray far, they curl up in some sheltered place at night, they know they need help.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. Thoreau: ‘Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations…’ Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves," said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word "track" in Tibetan: shul, "a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by - a footprint for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others ... Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“When you have become quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion. The places inside matter as much as the ones outside. It is as though in the way places stay with you and that you long for them they become deities...”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the are is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Mountaineering is always spoken of as though summiting is conquest, but as you get higher, the world gets bigger, and you feel smaller in proportion to it, overwhelmed and liberated by how much space is around you, how much room to wander, how much unknown.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“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 that Lear was a bad parent, denying nature, including the nature of children to leave their parents. Maybe Persephone thought Hades was the infinitely cool older man who held the knowledge she sought, maybe she loved the darkness, the six months of winter, the sharp taste of pomegranates, the freedom from her mother, maybe she knew that to be truly alive death had to be part of the picture just as winter must. It was as the queen of hell that she became an adult and came into power.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“In the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“There are people for whom there is only one sun in the sky or darkness, and there are those who live in a night filled with stars”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“In that sense of loss two streams mingled. One was the historian’s yearning to hang onto everything, write everything down, to try to keep everything from slipping away, and the historian’s joy in retrieving out of archives and interviews what was almost forgotten, almost out of reach forever. But the other stream is the common experience that too many things are vanishing without replacement in our time. At any given moment the sun is setting someplace on earth, and another day is slipping away largely undocumented as people slide into dreams that will seldom be remembered when they awaken. Only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable, makes it natural. There are more sunrises coming, but even dreams could be emptied out.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Nobody gets over anything; time doesn’t heal any wounds...the landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it’s made out of memory and desire...”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“reasonable. So in the practice of awareness, which has gone on for centuries after centuries and millennium after millennium, human beings have asked themselves, Hmmmm, how do I engage this process in a way that I don’t become too frightened by what it might unfold or too complacent by avoiding it? This is the delicate work of awareness.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anectodes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren't quite themselves and open onto the impossible.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Or maybe there's one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essence of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, “were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost