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"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."
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Explore more quotes by Rebecca Solnit
"Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds."
"It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after."
"Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
"The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest)."
"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it."
"Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance."
"Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on."
"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."
"Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use, time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space - for wilderness and public space - must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space."
"Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone."
Exlpore more Life quotes
"Will a loving God send a man to hell? The answer from Jesus and His teachings of the Bible is, clearly, “Yes!” He does not send man willingly, but man condemns himself to eternal hell because . . .he refuses God's way of salvation and the hope of eternal life with Him."
"The condition you're in at this moment is the product of your previous thoughts, to change your condition, change your thoughts."
Personal Development
"Instead of clinging to the only Lifeboat that can save, we have tossed overboard biblical truths in the name of [compromise], living on the edge of life, like the man who rides the parameter of a hurricane, daring it to sweep him away."
"There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises."
"There is always a path to our target, the problem is to discover it!"
"Money isn't the solution to your problems. It only lets you carry your unhappiness around in style."
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