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"Read good writing, and don't live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it's not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches."
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
"The literary man re-reads, other men simply read."
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
"One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters."
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."
Explore more quotes by Rebecca Solnit
"That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word 'lost' comes from the old Norse 'los' meaning the disbanding of an army, I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places, I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest."
"But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss."
"You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center."
"Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...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."
"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."
"Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act."
"I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness."
"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."
"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."
"The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."
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