Quotes from Rebecca Solnit

I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles

wealth and power are also often disasters, with casualties and wreckage. Maybe what often gets called wealth in booms should mostly be imagined as impoverishment of the majority who don't become wealthy and often become displaced or priced out locally, served up with the collateral damage from the concentration of power, resources, and the control of place.

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.

Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.

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.

Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark.

In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.

cause London is drowning and I— I live by the river.

reasonable. So in the practice of awareness, which has gone on for centuries after centuries and millennium after millennium, human beings have asked themselves, Hmmmm, how do I engage this process in a way that I don't become too frightened by what it might unfold or too complacent by avoiding it? This is the delicate work of awareness.

when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

knowledge can numb as well as awaken feeling.

The utopias built by citizens like Anna Holshouser are not yet on that map. But they should be. [active during 1906 earthquake and fire in SF CA]

Crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering.

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.

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.

You don't have to subscribe to a political ideology, move to a commune, or join the guerrillas in the mountains; you wake up in a society suddenly transformed, and chances are good you will be part of that transformation in what you do, in whom you connect to, in how you feel. Something changes.

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.

An idyll like that wasn't made to last. For a while it was forever, and then things started to fall apart.

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 a whole, see all the islands and

We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.

Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don't need to or can't go down it.

Saying this upset some men. Many among that curious gender are easy to upset, and when they are upset they don't know it. They just think you're wrong and sometimes also evil.

Had I visited at an earlier hour she would have found fault with something I'd done when I was with her. And had I not given her a copy, another failure could be charted. There was no winning, just some decisions about how to lose and how not to play.

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.