A Field Guide to Getting Lost Quotes

“It wasn't surprising and it wasn't quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine's corpse was and urged me to see her at the funeral chapel. This with her cigarettes still in my ashtray, her hair still in my brush, her clothes still in my car, her voice still in my ears, so soon after we'd been looking at ourselves together in my mirror and she the more lithe, the more fluidly beautiful of the two”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, it's memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“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.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“But 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

“La mejor forma de tratar la verdad es no pretender que una tiene una relación incontestable e imparcial con los hechos, sino revelar los propios deseos e intereses, porque la verdad no reside exclusivamente en los acontecimientos, sino también en las esperanzas y las necesidades.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“No representation is complete.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“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.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Una persona de veintitantos años ha sido un niño durante la mayor parte de su vida, pero con el paso del tiempo la porción que representa la infancia se vuelve cada vez menor, cada vez más lejana, cada vez menos nítida, aunque dicen que al final de la vida el principio regresa con una viveza renovada, como si hubiéramos dado la vuelta al mundo y regresáramos a la oscuridad de la que vinimos. Para los ancianos, a menudo lo más cercano y reciente se vuelve borroso y solamente aquello que se encuentra alejado en el tiempo y el espacio aparece bien definido.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Una guía sobre el arte de perderse

“Parece que los pintores estaban entusiasmados con el azul de la distancia, y mirando estos cuadros uno puede imaginarse un mundo en el que podría ir caminando por un terreno cubierto de hierba verde, troncos de árbol marrones y casas blancas, y entonces, en algún momento, llegar al país azul: la hierba, los árboles y las casas se volverían azules, y quizá al mirar al propio cuerpo uno vería que también es azul, como el dios hindú Krishna.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Una guía sobre el arte de perderse

“Y es que, como sucede con el azul de la distancia, la consecución y la llegada solo trasladan ese anhelo, no lo satisfacen, igual que cuando llegas a las montañas a las que te dirigías estas han dejado de ser azules y el azul ha pasado a teñir las que se encuentran detrás. Aquí se encuadra el misterio de por qué las tragedias son más hermosas que las comedias y por qué algunas canciones e historias tristes nos producen un inmenso placer. Siempre hay algo que está lejos.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Una guía sobre el arte de perderse

“«Este alto grado de diferenciación lingüística podría estar relacionado con la diferenciación ecológica. Según esta visión, los hablantes adaptaban su vocabulario a los nichos ecológicos que ocupaban y la enorme diversidad ecológica de California favoreció su diversidad lingüística. Esta teoría se ve sustentada por mapas que muestran que en las zonas con mayores cantidades de especies animales y vegetales también hay un mayor número de lenguas».”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“En wintu, es el mundo el que es estable y eres tú el que eres condicional, el que no eres nada al margen de tu entorno.”
― SOLNIT REBECCA, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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

“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.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Told from the man’s point of view, Vertigo is awash with romantic fog, but from the woman’s perspective, it’s about being forced to disappear— not from the top of a tower, but in everyday life as two successive lovers make her into someone else for their own ends, a common enough tragedy.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“An idyll like that wasn’t made to last. For a while it was forever, and then things started to fall apart.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Nobody gets over anything; time doesn’t heal any wounds; if he stopped loving her today, as one of George Jones’s most famous songs has it, it’s because he’s dead.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“cause London is drowning and I— I live by the river.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. . . . Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Live always at the ‘edge of mystery’— the boundary of the unknown.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“«sendero» en tibetano: shul, «una marca que permanece después de que pasa lo que la hizo;”
― Rebecca Solnit, Una guía sobre el arte de perderse

“Perder cosas tiene que ver con la desaparición de lo conocido, perderse tiene que ver con la aparición de lo desconocido.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Una guía sobre el arte de perderse

“Cómo emprenderás la búsqueda de aquello cuya naturaleza desconoces por completo?».”
― Rebecca Solnit, Una guía sobre el arte de perderse

“No perderte nunca es no vivir,”
― Rebecca Solnit, Una guía sobre el arte de perderse

“En mi opinión, su habilidad más importante era sencillamente el optimismo que les hacía pensar que iban a sobrevivir y encontrar el camino».”
― Rebecca Solnit, Una guía sobre el arte de perderse

“J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’—the boundary of the unknown.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“In the 1980s we imagined apocalypse because it was easier than the strange complicated futures that money, power, and technology would impose, intricate futures hard to exit. In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost