A Field Guide to Getting Lost Quotes

“Nothing of that tongue survived into my generation but a few insults: Yiddish can describe defects of character with the precision that Inuit describes ice or Japanese rain.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Solo cuando la miel se convierte en polvo quedas libre.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Hay cosas que solo poseemos si están perdidas, hay cosas que no se pierden si de ellas nos separa la distancia.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Una guía sobre el arte de perderse

“Si el dolor y la belleza están conectados, quizá con la madurez llega no lo que Nabhan llama abstracción, sino un sentido estético que compensa parcialmente las pérdidas que sufrimos con el tiempo y que encuentra belleza en lo distante.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Una guía sobre el arte de perderse

“Adulthood is made up of a prudent anticipation and a philosophical memory that make you navigate more slowly and steadily.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“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

“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 and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness. It's based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there's not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Pero las verdaderas dificultades, el verdadero arte de la supervivencia, parecen residir en terrenos más sutiles. Lo que se necesita en esos terrenos es una especie de resiliencia psicológica, estar preparado para hacer frente a lo que venga. Estos cautivos ponen de manifiesto de manera cruda y dramática algo que sucede en las vidas de todo el mundo: las transiciones a través de las cuales uno deja de ser quien era.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Los adolescentes se imaginan muriendo jóvenes porque les es más fácil imaginarse la muerte que imaginarse a la persona en la que quizá los conviertan todas las decisiones y responsabilidades de la vida adulta.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Los adolescentes se imaginan muriendo jóvenes porque les es más fácil imaginarse la muerte que imaginarse a la persona en la quizá los conviertan todas las decisiones y responsabilidades de la vida adulta.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped. Sometimes we’re calling out for help.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“when he brought her to San Francisco, “She was like a child come home. Everything about the city excited her; she had to walk all the hills, explore the edge of the ocean, see all the old houses and wander the old streets; and when she came upon something unchanged, something that was as it had been, her delight was so strong, so fiercely possessive! These things were hers. And yet she had never been here before. . . . She possessed it,”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“...it's okay to sometimes experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier. It's okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it's okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped. Sometimes we're calling out for help. Sometimes we're offering hep, and then this hostile world becomes a very different place. It is a world where there is help being received and help being given, and in such a world this compelling determined world according to me loses some of its urgency and desperation. It's not so necessary in a generous world, in a world where help is available, to be so adamant about the world according to me.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few named, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don't know what tongues the people who erected that standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don't know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don't know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don't know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don't exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?”
― 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. There isn't a story to tell, 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. It's a shock to find yourself outdoors and alone again, hard to imagine that you could ever live in another house, big where this one was small, small where it was big, hard when your body has learned all the twists and turns of the staircase so that you could walk it in your sleep, hard when you have built it from scratch and called it home, hard to imagine building again. But you lit the fire that burned it down yourself.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“This suggests that most European-Americans remained lost over the centuries, lost not in practical terms but in the more profound sense of apprehending where they truly were, of caring what the history of the place was and its nature. Instead, they named it after the places they had left and tried to reconstruct those places through imported plants, animals, and practices, though pumpkin, maple, and other staples would enter their diet as words like Connecticut and Dakota and raccoon would enter their vocabularies.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“I always knew that my middle name was an anglicized version of a great-grandmother's name, but I dropped it in my teens, not liking its sound and feeling that a middle name was unnecessary, given how few people have my last name. Only now have I realized which great-grandmother that name belonged to, only writing this story do I know the name of that unknown woman and that it is also mine, or is now the blank space between my names.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“I think sometimes that I became a historian because I didn't have a history, but also because I was interested in telling the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive entity.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“A case could be made that they would have been better off melting into the landscape as no doubt many now forgotten did, adopting native tongues, stories, places to love, ceasing to be exiled from so that they could wholly embrace the country they were in. Only by losing that past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it. Perhaps that willful forgetting, that refusal to tell tales, came from the wish that we could become native to the New World as they never did, never could, to the Old.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“When I recovered the blouse, I lost the memory, for the two were irreconcilable. It vanished in an instant, and I saw it go. Sometimes you hear of murals and miraculously preserved bodies buried, sealed, protected from light for hundreds or thousands of years. Exposed to the fresh air and light for the first time, they begin to fade, crumble, disappear. Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies never go beyond what they know.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“a map written in the darkness of your guts, readable in a cross section of your autopsied heart.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Every love has its landscape.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Jewish tradition holds that some questions are more significant than their answers.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The end of the world was wind-scoured but peaceful, black cormorants and red starfish on wave-washed dark rocks below a sandy bluff, and beyond them all the sea spreading far and then farther.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“In the distance was the celestial drama of summer thunderstorms, clouds assembling in vast arrays that demonstrated how far the sky went and how high, that shifted from the bundled white cumulus into the deep blue of storm clouds, and when we were lucky, poured down rain and lightning and shafts of light and vapor trails like a violent redemption. It was as though the whole world consisted of the tiny close-up realm of these creatures and the vast distances of heaven, as though my own scale had been eliminated along with the middle ground, and this too is one of the austere luxuries of the desert.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost