The collection / 197 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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197 results · Page 7 of 9Play this collection ▷

01c. 1961 AD

Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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02c. 1961 AD

Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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03c. 1961 AD

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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04c. 1961 AD

The coolness of Buddhism isn't indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as whole, see all the islands and the routes between them. Up close it all dissolves into texture and incoherence and immersion, like a face going out of focus just before a kiss.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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05c. 1961 AD

When you are well, your own body is a sealed country into which you need not explore far, but when you are unwell, there is no denying that you are made up of organs and fluids and chemistry and that the mechanisms by which your body operates are not invincible.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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06c. 1961 AD

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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07c. 1961 AD

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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08c. 1961 AD

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and on of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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09c. 1961 AD

The self is...a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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10c. 1961 AD

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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11c. 1961 AD

I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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12c. 1961 AD

Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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13c. 1961 AD

Some people love their story that much even if it's of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don't know how to stop telling it. Maybe it's about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear—you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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14c. 1961 AD

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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15c. 1961 AD

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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16c. 1961 AD

Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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17c. 1961 AD

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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18c. 1961 AD

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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19c. 1961 AD

As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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20c. 1961 AD

The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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21c. 1961 AD

This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out by contrast how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies. Many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it when they encounter it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and long-term social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this ear's potential paradises is in hell.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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22c. 1961 AD

Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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23c. 1961 AD

Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be?

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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24c. 1961 AD

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.

Rebecca Solnit / quote

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