Top Rebecca Solnit Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Rebecca Solnit Biography

Rebecca Solnit (born June 24, 1961) is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where bi-monthly she writes the magazine's "Easy Chair" essay.

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Rebecca Solnit Quotes

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels

Goals, Squares, Think, Thinking, Virginia, Work

Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.

Adventure, Down, Good, Reason, Turn, Turns

Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Forces, Images, Revolt, Struggle, Women, Writing

It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

Back, Exploring The World, Giving, Like, Memories, Ways

. . . the questions a photographer raises may be more profound than the answers the medium permits.

Answers, May, Photographer, Profound

It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.

Aliens, Climate, Corporate, Lie, Lying

I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.

Bind, Grateful, Rights, Violently, Voice

Think of civil society and the state as joined in a marriage of necessity. You already know who the wife is, the one who is supposed to love, cherish and obey: that's civil society. Think of the state as the domineering husband who expects to have a monopoly on power, on violence, on planning and policymaking.

Already, Husband, Policymaking, Society, Thinking, Wife

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.

Epiphany, Errand, Errands, Magic, Mingling

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

Deep, Fun, Language, Maybe, Meaningful, Needs

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.

Rain, Coffee, Adventure, Aptitude, Test, Architecture

Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Class, Doe, Gender, Nationality, Race

For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.

Adventure, Direction, Imagination, Lost, Self

A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens - to be informed and engaged.

Activism, Duty, People, Political, Thinking

Books are solitudes in which we meet.

Book, Books, Meet, Solitude, Solitudes

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

Art, Balance, Limits, Operation, Paradoxical, Unforeseen

No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.

Back, Coming Back, Keep, Knows, Matter, Place

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.

Architecture, Chance, Choices, Design, Desire, Freedom

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.

Abduction, Accident, Believe, Knowledge, People, Worry

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.

Cities, Contains, Imagination, Inhabitant, Spurs

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