Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

Without stupid, helpless people to save, heroes become unnecessary. Or rather, without them, it turns out that we are all heroes, even if distinctly unstereotypical ones

It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...

the outsiders stick together because their differences from each other are insignificant in the face of their differences from a hostile mainstream.

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.

But ignorance is one form of tolerance, whether it's pretending we live in a colorblind society or one in which misogyny is some quaint old thing we've gotten over.

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.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.—WALLACE STEVENS, "OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS

Smile, a man orders you, and that's a concise way to say that he owns you; he's the boss; you do as you're told; your face is there to serve his life, not express your own. He's someone; you're no one.

This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view.

When you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns, but not about men

Cynicism is, first of all, a style of presenting oneself, and more than anything, cynics take pride in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both of those things.

Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens.

We're fighting for a society in which everyone is important.

Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts

I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...

Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before the way is found or followed.

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.

I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes

Much fuss has been made over the idea of the frontier, as though it were a line advancing east to west, but the West was settled piece meal, and Indians fled in many directions to escape the tightening noose of the railroad lines and towns.

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.

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.